Author Archives: MMarks

Translation problems in murder trial/Übersetzungsprobleme in Mordverhandlung

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Steve at languagehat takes up an article by Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker (abstract available here, full article only on subscription). The subject is a murder trial requiring written translation of an audiotape in Russian and Bukhori (a dialect of Persian spoken by the Bukharian Jews in Central Asia). It seems that the audiotape was difficult to hear and the translator made a number of errors, although there isn’t enough evidence as to why. The biggest misunderstanding was very favourable to the prosecution – one person to another, travelling in a car, saying ‘Are you getting off?’ but translated as ‘Are you going to make me happy?’ – the verb used is described as odd by commenters to the languagehat entry, and was apparently hard to hear anyway.

I haven’t got the full article, but I find some curious features:

One can imagine the translator’s own happiness when he heard those lines—and Leventhal’s when he read them in the transcript.

Leventhal was the main prosecutor. I don’t know why the translator would be happy.

We go through life mishearing and misseeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

This raises a number of questions. The prosecution should certainly not be playing for high stakes if this means getting a conviction on the basis of one translated sentence – they would have to have a lot more to convince them. Prosecution should not be about convicting people at all costs. And if two people are in a car, then ‘Are you getting off?’ is not exactly a tale told by an idiot that needs to be reconstrued to make sense.

(I’ve read at least three books by Janet Malcolm, all of which were excellent – most recently ‘Two Lives – Gertrude and Alice’, but here I have not enough to go on).

LATER NOTE (and spoiler): I did actually get the whole article. It’s extremely interesting and is mainly a psychological study of what we know of people in court cases. It’s clear there will be an appeal. The problem with the audiotape transcription strongly suggests this was unreliable evidence, but in the context of the whole, it appears just one piece in the mosaic. One has the impression that the trial was unfair to the defendants and to the defence counsel, but nevertheless that the defendant Borukhova may have been correctly convicted.

Translating foreign-language litigation documents/Übersetzung für Gerichtsverhandlungen

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An article by Erik Sherman at law. com, Don’t Let Litigation Get Lost in Translation
Can language conversion software cut cross-border litigation bills?

discusses the problems for a litigation lawyer of dealing with a huge amount of foreign-language material. One has heard tales of US lawyers being presented with truckloads of papers at the discovery stage (Offenlegung).

The conclusions seem to be:

Use machine translation (MT) to get a rough idea of which documents might be worth translating

The article mentions free software and implies that there are other systems. It doesn’t mention the possibility, if you often work with a particular language, of ‘training’ an in-house MT system to translate certain terms in a certain way, to expect legal terminology rather than general terminology and so on. Nor does it mention the problems of optical character recognition (OCR) if the documents are poor faxes. They may even be handwritten. If documents are not in electronic form, you might need to call in a translator to help you sift them. I remember Steve Vitek‘s stories of helping lawyers sort through Japanese patents.

If you need to keep an eye out for keywords, get a translator to identify them in the foreign language, since if they are inconsistently MTd, you may overlook them in English.

Get important documents translated by a human translator

For languages using a different alphabet or writing system, get a translator to identify possible software problems in advance

If you have to use several human translators, use a computer-aided translation system (CAT – translation memory) or at least a glossary to keep them consistent on the main terminology

Don’t let your lawyers change to a foreign language to discuss sensitive issues in the hope that the other side won’t notice what you’re up to

A law firm’s translation department should know a lot of this already. But maybe there are fewer translation departments in the USA.

The article doesn’t go into detail on what law firms need to know, for instance when it obliquely refers to CAT.

Once down to the critical documents, it’s time for human translation. But even here, translation technology plays an important role. Not only can it help jump-start an experienced translator’s efforts, but it can also enforce important uniformity of translation. “A lot of words are subject to multiple interpretations, so what can happen is that you can have two duplicates that have been translated differently, and it can have consequences,” says Constantine Cannon’s Solow. The more translators working on a matter, the greater the chance for variability in translation. Professional translation tools can “learn” specific translation choices and then present them as preferred options to any translator on the team. The translators then feed refined translations back into the tools, increasing the speed of the entire process. And suddenly, you’re ready for court before you can count un, deux, trois.

Sounds great. I incline more to quatre-vingts-dix myself.

I would add to the above: if you have a good translator who knows about software, don’t underestimate their value to you.

This is a weird statement:

The problem of trusting a translation becomes even more critical when dealing with many Asian languages, in which a single character can represent a complex concept. “One of those characters could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of meanings,” says Duncan McCampbell, president of international business consultancy McCampbell Global and a former litigator. “There are characters in Chinese [for example] that have no equivalent in English.”

(Via MA Translation Studies News)

Lawyers’ costs compared/Anwaltskosten England und Deutschland

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The Jackson Report on the reform of civil litigation costs in the UK was published in January 2010.

The final report and the two volumes of the preliminary report can be downloaded here.

Interestingly, at the end of the second volume of the preliminary report there are descriptions of the system in other countries, for instance Chapter 55: Germany, pp. 555 to 565.

1.1 The German rules of civil procedure contemplate cost shifting, albeit according to well-defined scales for recovery. The effect may be that a successful litigant is entitled to recover a smaller proportion of its actual fees than would be recoverable in England and Wales.
1.2 The German system permits the use of contingency fees only in limited circumstances, namely where a claimant does not have the means to retain lawyers for his case. Legal aid is available in certain civil cases.
1.3 In Germany, civil litigation is managed by the court so that it controls the proceedings and the evidence that is brought before it. One method by which the court does this is to appoint experts to assist the court on relevant factual issues, rather than leaving it to the parties to adduce their own expert evidence.

Useful footnotes too:

According to German Civil Procedure Code section 3(1), the value of the dispute is to be determined by the court in its “absolute discretion”. I am advised, however, by senior German judges that in practice no discretion is involved when the litigation concerns quantified or readily quantifiable claims.

Interesting reading and good for vocabulary too.

Returning to the UK, the shadow on the horizon is LPO – Legal Process Outsourcing, which will permit some work to be outsourced, for instance to India.

(Via the euleta list at Yahoo Groups).

Slow blogging/Viele Pausen

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There’s probably no point in saying that blogging may be slow in the next few weeks, since it has also been slow in the last few weeks.

I have added a photo to the entry where you can buy the Pope for your train set, and another to the entry with the ad for a Fürth lawyer.

It seems to me that blogging is slowing down. Some German weblogs, meanwhile, seem to be mutating into food blogs when they weren’t before. This is not a food blog, so I won’t give the recipes for recent successes – sucking pig’s head before and after, and coconut pyramids:

British and US spelling rant/Britische und amerikanische Rechtschreibung

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This rant developed out of my reply to a comment.

There are some spelling differences between BE and AE. This is not a secret, and I would think that every person educated enough to be using a bilingual law dictionary knows what they are or can check up somewhere else.

Nevertheless, I have seen a number of bilingual law dictionaries that give both spellings, even though space for legal content is limited. (I’m limiting this to DE>EN dictionaries, but the problem arises in the other direction too). For instance, in the latest Romain DE>EN, I find:

Entziehung einer Lizenz: revocation of a US license/GB licence

The old Romain just had revocation of a licence.

In Romain, the same abbreviations are used for spelling and law. Thus:

Gesellschaftssatzung f US (corporate) charter/GB memorandum and articles of association

The small dictionary by Karin Linhart uses AE and BE for spelling and US and Br for law.

zu Geld machen: to realize (AE), to realise (BE)

Nachlassverwalter bei gesetzlicher Erbfolge: ErbR administrator (US)

This is odd, because this is the UK term too (of course, one can’t always generalize for the whole of the UK or the US, but that is a separate question)

Even odder:

Tagebuch: diary (BE)

There may be some confusion with Kalender here.

Kalender: m calendar, diary; Terminkalender diary (BE), in den Kalender eintragen to diarize (AE), to diarise (BE), to calendar.

But as far as I am concerned the AE/BE spelling distinctions could be thrown out. Of course, this would leave situations where a purely US term, for instance ‘Your Honor’ (used in only one court in England and Wales – most common is ‘My Lord’) might be spelt in the US way and the rest in the British way, depending on the editor’s decision. This is illogical, but many things are illogical in dictionaries – complete consistency is not achievable because language and law are complex.

Similarly, the Langenscheidt Alpmann Fachwörterbuch Recht gives both spellings and uses AE and BE for both spelling and law:

Straftat f (CrLaw) criminal act; criminal offence (AE offense); crime

Erblasser m (BE) deceased; (AE) decedent; testator

The spelling differences are not given in Cornelson’s Wörterbuch Recht, only the law differences.

Dietl has:

Straftat criminal offence (offense); penal act (Verbrechen, Vergehen)

This at least doesn’t waste space telling us which spelling is which.

Lundmark’s Talking Law Dictionary has:

Lizenz: licence (-se)

This is also an improvement from the point of view of space.

Now two particular points that annoy me: ise/ize and judgment/judgement

The fact is that the –ize ending is quite common in BE, though not as common as –ise. I’ve mentioned this before, and here is some evidence.

I therefore wish dictionaries, and the EU English style guide, would not prescribe what is right and wrong here in BE. Above all, as said before, I think nearly all Germans believe that –ize is wrong in BE. Possibly it’s easier to remember: US is A, UK is B. If people think they can make such black-and-white distinctions between the USA and UK, they are much mistaken.

Pam Peters, in The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, prefers –ize (she’s Australian). She quotes OUP, which of course always uses –ize, and then says that contemporary British writers prefer –ise – but the gap is not very wide, see the British National Corpus:

realise 3898, realize 2234
recognise 3641, recognize 2104

There is an even greater preference for –ise in Australian spelling, possibly reinforced by the Australian government. And there are words that have to be written –ise anyway (advertise, advise, supervise, surprise and many more). But US dictionaries are allowing advertize, comprize and other forms, according to Peters.

Equally annoying is the belief of German bilingual law dictionaries that judgment is the AE spelling and judgement the BE spelling. In fact, judgement is commonly used in general BE texts, but UK lawyers tend to write judgment. I’ve been here before too

And even Garner makes the point (thanks, Tom!):

Judgment is the preferred form in AmE and seems to be preferred in British legal texts, even as far back as the 19th century. Judgement is prevalent in British nonlegal texts, and was thought by Fowler to be the better form. Glanville Williams states that, in BrE, ‘judgement should really be the preferred spelling.’