I haven’t previously had to translate Abwicklungsvertrag. This was in the context of an attorney’s practice areas, which included drafting Aufhebungsverträge (a contract terminating employment) and Abwicklungsverträge (a contract dealing with the end of employment, after termination has already taken place).

I decided to go for termination agreements and post-termination agreements (the employment context was clear). I could imagine using the German terms in brackets in some contexts. If Harald Schwamborn’s definitions are correct, I don’t think there is anything in English law quite like an Abwicklungsvertrag:

Beim Aufhebungsvertrag wird das Arbeitsverhältnis durch den Vertrag beendet. Beim Abwicklungsvertrag geht eine Kündigung – in der Regel des Arbeitgebers – voraus. Das Arbeitsverhältnis wird also nicht durch den Abwicklungsvertrag beendet, sondern durch die vorausgehende Kündigung. In dem Abwicklungsvertrag wird lediglich geregelt, “wie man auseinander geht”.

I do find the discussions on proz.com a great resource, although I decided not to follow the results of this one. Kim found an excellent resource at Jones Day (link doesn’t work for me), which suggested settlement agreement. I find that a bit unclear. The original asker’s client obviously had no idea how to deal with the term:

In unserer arbeitsrechtlichen Praxis finden Verwendung:
Aufhebungsvertrag – settlement agreement
Abwicklungsvertrag – contract finalizing agreement
Abwicklung eines Vertrages – winding up a contract

I found a description of German labour law in English at the ILO, but it doesn’t have enough German terminology interspersed.

LATER NOTE (November 2007): the Abwicklungsvertrag struck me as odd again. It means dealing with all the steps of putting an end to an employment relationship. One suggestion was phase-out agreement, more common with greenhouse gases (albeit less effective). I am now tending to settlement agreement. I found this here (excerpt from an article of which non-subscribers could not read the rest, September 2004):

Article Excerpt
If an employer wishes to end an employment relationship, it can do so either by terminating the employee and trying to conclude a so-called settlement agreement or by trying to conclude a mutually acceptable severance agreement with the employee. An employee will generally only come to terms with an employer on a severance agreement or settlement agreement if the employer agrees to pay an acceptable termination payment. Please note the difference between a “severance agreement” (Aufhebungsvertrag) and a “settlement agreement” (Abwicklungsvertrag). A severance agreement is an agreement concluded between the employee and the employer whereby they…

The BBC and snopes.com/my way report (with pictures) on a warning notice on a washing machine, ‘Do not put any person in this washer’.

I have to admit I can’t see the harm in giving such warnings, just because some people think they’re obvious. It seems that books with collections of such trivia sell well, though. These finance the work of M-Law, a Michigan organization against frivolous litigation.

My Way News writes:

A spokeswoman for the manufacturer said the washer warning label is far from wacky.
“A front loader is just at the right height – speaking now as a mother and not a corporate spokeswoman – for a 4-year-old,” said Patti Andresen-Shew, marketing director for Alliance Laundry Systems LLC in Ripon, Wis.
She said there have been lawsuits filed against companies – “fortunately not ours” – after small children got into coin-operated laundry equipment and an older child started the machine.
The Center for Justice and Democracy, a group fighting legislation to limit the right to sue, said warning labels play a vital role in protecting the public.
“Often, it is only through lawsuits brought by injured consumers that manufacturers have been forced to place critical warning labels on dangerous products, saving millions of lives and preventing innumerable injuries,” it said in a statement.

Anyway, they can’t stop me if I really want to.

(Thanks to Volkmar Hirantner – also seen in RA-Blog)

Feuerzangenbowle is a form of punch, where a sugar loaf supported horizontally above a pot of mulled wine is soaked with rum and set light to, so that the burning sugar falls into the wine. h2g2, the BBC’s proto-Wiki, describes how to do it.

This picture, which I took yesterday at about 17.30, shows a cauldron calling itself the biggest Feuerzangenbowle in the world, which has been irritating some persons in Nuremberg who claim it draws people away from the Christkindlsmarkt (that’s over now, but the Feuerzangenbowle continues till Sunday).

It was translated as ‘the world’s biggest burnt punch event’, and I see Muret-Sanders has ‘burnt punch’, a rather disturbing and puzzling term. I also found on the Web ‘mulled wine punch’, which sounds better, although it rather glosses over the role of the rum, ‘flaming red wine punch’, ‘flaming fire tongs punch’ (sounds like the tongs we used to use to put coal on the fire, and as if the tongs were on fire – the Feuerzange is a tong-like device intended to hold the sugar loaf). The Heinz Rühmann film (which was showing on two screens at the site) is even once rendered as ‘The Fire Tongue Bowl’, a masterpiece of false friendliness.

For a picture of a sugar loaf (Zuckerhut), I turn to CAPL.

The December 17 page at LLRX.com has two useful entries:

Bloggers Beware: Debunking Nine Copyright Myths of the Online World, by Kathy Biehl

and

Criminal Justice Resources: Criminal Law Blogs, by Ken Strutin

There’s been a discussion on an ITI list as to whether translators into English use ‘he’ or ‘he and she’.

My answer was that it depends on the client, but I often use ‘he and she’, avoiding the construction as much as possible by using plurals and other devices.

It is very common in legal English to repeat a noun rather than use a pronoun: ‘a director must resign a director’s office’ rather than ‘resign his office’ or ‘resign his or her office’. This is useful in other cases too, where the German er / sie / es disambiguates and the translator has to be careful to make clear what ‘it’ refers to.

One suggestion was to follow the Interpretation Act, where the masculine includes the feminine. To that I would say that the Interpretation Act is a good suggestion, but it is intended for interpretation in an English court, whereas my translations go to people all over the world who have not read the English Interpretation Act. But see no. 6 of the Interpretation Act 1978, a PDF of which is on this site.

G.C. Thornton in Legislative Drafting has some suggestions on this, which I list below. But translators do not have the freedom that writers do. (To give another example, if the German cites pages 5 ff., the translator cannot take the advice of citing the exact pages – 5-7, 5-11 or whatever, because the translator doesn’t know which pages were meant…I notice I repeated ‘the translator’ there, instead of writing ‘she’ to include the masculine).

Here are Thornton’s suggestions:

1. Repeat the noun in place of a pronoun. Use ‘his or her’ in place of ‘his’
3. Recast the sentence using the plural
4. Omit the pronoun:
‘On reaching the age of 80, a director must resign office’ (instead of ‘resign his office’)
5. Replace a nominalisation with a verb form:
‘consent to’ instead of ‘give his consent’
6. Recast the sentence using a relative clause:
‘A person who has lodged a memorandum of appeal may…’ instead of
‘If a person has lodged, he may…’
7. Recast the sentence using a participle:
‘before lodging an appeal’
instead of ‘before he lodges an appeal’.

The year is still new, but the German word of the year has already appeared.

In February last year, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) found that a statute permitting civilian planes to be shot down if they were hijacked was unconstitutional. The New Anatolian reports:

Wolfgang Schaeuble said officials will draw up new legislation and an amendment to the constitution after the country’s supreme court rejected an earlier air-safety law, the Saechsische Zeitung newspaper reported. Shooting down hijacked passenger planes could be justified if the threat to Germany was considered severe, Schaeuble said, according to the paper.
“In the case of Sept. 11, the shooting down (of the hijacked planes) would have been necessary as well as legally admissible,” he was quoted as saying.

Article 115a of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) refers to the Verteidigungsfall – literally, the situation where defence is necessary (Muret-Sanders im V.: if defence becomes necessary). If this noun is used a lot, it becomes difficult to render it elegantly in English. Schäuble wants to create the Quasi-Verteidigungsfall (situation analogous to the situation where defence is necessary).

For a German article see the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Then, of course, there is the Bündnisfall (Nato-ville), and others too: Störfall, Ernstfall, to say nothing of Kniefall, Schneefall and Sündenfall. A diagram of Verteidigungsfall can be found if it’s looked up at Leipzig.