This story has been around since well before Christmas and no doubt all readers know about it. The British Ministry of Justice decided to save money on court interpreters and instead of taking interpreters from a national register it transferred all jobs to be dealt with by ALS (Applied Language Solutions), a translation and interpreting agency which offered very low rates. Travel expenses were all radically cut. It was one of those situations where an interpreter would be better off staying at home and working as a cleaner.

Channel 4 News had a summary of it recently: Court translation service in crisis after cost-cutting deal.

Around 1,000 interpreters have not been turning up to court because of the reduced pay and expenses offered by ALS. As a result, court hearings reliant on interpreters have been delayed or postponed, at a high cost to the MoJ and the taxpayer.

One of the most serious cases was at Leeds Crown Court on February 22, which led Judge Robert Bartfield to say: “Apart from the waste of time for the jurors, the distress caused to witnesses and the defendant himself, the cost of this now aborted trial is likely to run into thousands of pounds.” …

At Boston Magistrates court, on February 1, Channel 4 News was told that a Polish interpreter turned up to court wearing a hat and overalls and didn’t understand the solicitor when he said they needed to go down to the cells.

The following day at Basildon Magistrates Court, the interpreter did not know what an oath was. It emerged that this was her first time in court, and she was not familiar with the legal language or protocol.

I must admit that my hopes for sensible attitudes to and pay for court interpreting have always been low. But I did not expect the Ministry of Justice to shoot itself in the foot quite so badly that it looks as if the protesting interpreters may succeed in their wishes.

One could write masses on this, but let me just give a link to a couple of

Questions in parliament. The government seems to take the view that the problems are ‘teething troubles’. Here the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State fails to answer the questions, but he does cite what steps ALS is taking to improve things:

Arranging additional interpreter assessment centres.

Recruitment of additional call handlers, booking administrators and linguist relationship managers.

Introduction of a new administrative team, purely with the function of issuing customer updates.

Secondment of a process management specialist, a management information specialist and an outbound calling team with the brief of further developing the supply of interpreters.

Improvements to the automated booking system.

I love the new job of ‘linguist relationship manager’.

The subject has even hit Mox’s Blog in a cartoon today.

One of the commenters there links to an article about a Czech interpreter who registered her pet rabbit as an interpreter with ALS.

Per Döhler and Thea Döhler have started a joint blog on translation and marketing called Triablog.

It has already built up quite a few articles in secret, but is only now officially launched.

Entries are in German, English or Swedish. There’s also an index, which is a very good idea, in addition to the categories. (I am unhappy with my own system of categories – some of the most useful older posts are unlikely to come to light again, and I have never got round to tagging all the entries imported from my original Movable Type blog). There are tags as well as categories, and there are categories and tags in the various languages, so I will stop thinking about how it all fits together – the main thing is that it’s easy to navigate.

Topics are translation, tax (Per is famous for his disquisition on German VAT), what’s going on in Barendorf and more. Here’s a recent post recommending we use the 24-hour clock in English, at least for European contexts:

In nearly all European countries, while the 12-hour clock may still be used in daily speech, you practically never see it in writing. Where there is an official standard, it calls for the 24-hour time format. But even in Britain (and in Ireland), you can see the 24-hour clock used in timetables, weather reports, in science, and in the military – and of course on the Internet. One may safely assume that there will no serious comprehension problems.

Conversely, changing English texts to reflect the 12-hour clock makes not only for untidy typography but also for potential confusion among all readers, not just those who are not used to seeing things like “12:00 pm” in print. (Incidentally, is that noon or midnight? Even educated native speakers of English are not sure on this issue.) If your schedule says 5:30 pm and the clock on the wall shows 17:20, can you still make it? That is easier to find out if you stay within one system – for the same reason, street names are usually left untranslated.*

The home page has the word Triablog superimposed on images of eight of their ‘summer offices’ abroad. In the ADÜ-Nord Infoblatt 5/2011 (under Publikationen at www.adue-nord.de) there is an article by Per and Thea describing how they combined work and holidays abroad in their summer office by moving everything abroad – to San Francisco, to Sydney, to Oxford, to Stockholm – every year since 1997, and they give suggestions on how to do this.

Happy reading!

Mark Liberman at Language Log has once again, in two posts, discussed the use of corpora in US courts.

I’ve previously mentioned how translators might use a corpus to analyse specialist vocabulary. We do something a bit like that every time we use a search engine to see if an English term is used more in the UK, in US academia or maybe in Germany (could be Denglish). By using special software we can improve the quality of this kind of search.

But that’s not what interests me in the US court examples. What is interesting there is whether a judge can learn to get a better understanding of what words might mean than by just opening a dictionary. Because the understanding of language, particularly by German judges, has sometimes struck me as somewhat retarded. There may be hope in some parts of the USA, though.

The post Corpus linguistics in statutory interpretation (with links) discusses how Judge Posner determined the meaning of the word ‘to harbor’. Among other things, he did a Google search, which indicated that the verb implied sheltering someone, not just living with them.

The post An empirical path to plain legal meaning
links to a PDF file of an article by Stephen Mouritsen, “Hard Cases and Hard Data: Assessing Corpus Linguistics as an Empirical Path to Plain Meaning“:

This Article argues that the plain or ordinary meaning of a given term in a given context is an empirical matter that may be quantified through corpus-based methods. These methods, when applied to questions of legal ambiguity, present significant advantages over existing empirical approaches to plain meaning and over the prevailing intuition-based interpretive approach of many courts. Because large, sophisticated linguistic corpora are widely available and easy to use, and because corpus methods offer a more principled and systematic alternative to the impressionistic interpretation of legal texts, corpus linguistics may one day revolutionize the process of legal interpretation.

There are a number of rules of statutory interpretation in England and in the USA, as there are in Germany – the plain meaning rule is just one of them, and sometimes others override it. But it’s obviously true that ‘plain meaning’ will mean different things to different people.

The Language Log post also has links to a lot of earlier posts on this topic – I’ve linked to them before too. Mark adds an important corrective:

But it’s important to note that corpus-based methods, here as elsewhere, are a source of evidence for linguistic arguments, not a substitute for linguistic arguments. Without an understanding of the categories, structures, and interpretive issues involved in a given question, corpus evidence can lead you as far astray as dictionary quotations can.

It’s a difficult situation. Just as judges have traditionally decided whether someone was insane or had diminished responsibility in a legal sense, rather than in the opinion of psychologists, so I suppose the plain meaning of a statute provision has also traditionally been an amateur’s interpretation. Are these attitudes changing now?

I’ve mentioned sewing of documents before. euobserver.com posts a link to a little video which at least gives a partial impression of sewing the Fiscal Compact Treaty.

I find the RSS feed of euobserver is useful just to briefly scan some of the EU stories that sometimes get overlooked in other news sources.

1. Volcano

Apparently the Daily Mail has been stirring up fears that a volcano in Germany is about to erupt and cover Europe in ash.

Tabloid Watch: Mail removes scaremongering article about volcano

Englische Zeitung weckt weltweit Angst vor Laacher-See-Vulkan

Auch andere ausländische Medien sind auf den britischen Zug aufgesprungen. Zeitungen und Internetportale in Rumänien, Italien, Frankreich, Griechenland, der Schweiz, Norwegen und sogar in den Arabischen Emiraten berichten über den gefährlichen deutschen „Super-Vulkan“ unter dem Laacher See.

Mind you, something very similar appeared in Der Spiegel five years ago.

2. German-Iranian friction boosts Bratwurst prices, The Local

In shock news for Germans everywhere, the sausage industry is feeling the rising cost of importing sheep intestines from Iran, leading Nürnberger Bratwurst producer Claus Steiner told The Local on Friday.

Sheep intestinal lining – a key ingredient in making the sausage – is largely imported from Iran, which has a 500-year history of trading animal by-products. But this may change, as the price of sheep gut has almost tripled in the past 18 months.

A year and a half ago 90 metres of intestinal lining, enough to encase about 1,000 delicious bratwursts, cost just €6.30. But now the same length costs a whopping €17.20 – an alarming price hike that sausage-loving Germans may feel come barbecue season.

And you thought it was all about nuclear weapons. I’m not sure that boosts is the right word in the headline.

Seller of Munich street newspaper (Obdachlosenzeitung) BISS.

It’s just as well I went to Munich last Friday – I had neglected to get a ticket to hear Herr Gauck giving his last reading before becoming Bundespräsident, at the Berolzheimerianum in Fürth (aka Die Comödie). I also missed out on the last performances of Biermosl Blosn.

Viktualienmarkt

Small car.