Real property is land. It’s called real because a person dispossessed of land used to be able to claim the land itself (res: thing – the Germans have a term dinglich – ‘thingly’ – that is close to this meaning). This means the same as the immovables /immoveables in Roman law systems: Immobilien, Liegenschaften, Grundstücke.

Personal property is everything apart from ‘ownership’ of land (actually you can’t own land in England and Wales, because it belongs to the Crown, but let’s forget about that for the moment). It doesn’t mean movables, therefore – it’s a wider term. It breaks down into:

Chattels real: leasehold interests in land – called real because they have to do with land, called chattels because they aren’t land.

Chattels personal: a superordinate term for:

Choses in action: debts, cheques, claims, patents. These are forms of property you may have to take legal action to enforce.

Choses in possession: physical movable things, bewegliche Sachen in German.

Were I to return to the interesting question still pursued at Language Log as to when and if a fish changes its status without being smoked, and what possessed the Irish Senate to consider this, I would need to start with this diagram. Unfortunately I still have to do some work today.

It was hard work doing this diagram. The slightly grey background of the top three fields was not intentional.

The John Doe topic leads Mark Liberman at Language Log to a discussion of personal chattels and chattels real in the Irish Senate in 1973.

bq. Mr. Cooney: There is no definition in the Statute or in the parent Act of personal chattels. But “personal chattels” has been for so long a legal term that it now has a certain legal standing. If the Senator wishes I can quote for him a definition from Wharton’s Law Lexicon where “personal chattels” is defined. When the Senator hears the definition he will be quite satisfied that no difficulty will arise in interpreting the Act and deciding what it applies to.

bq. Chattels personal or in a more narrow and more modern sense, “chattels” means movable property or effects which belong personally to the owner and for which if they are injuriously withheld from him he has, in general, no other remedy than by personal action … while a mixed action of ejectment in which the plaintiff could recover the specific property was available in the case of “chattels real”.

I find this discussion a bit confusing. To my mind there is a difference between chattels personal and personal chattels. The Oxford Dictionary of Law confirms this: personal chattels are defined in the Administration of Estates Act 1925 and do not include chattels used for business purposes at the intestate’s death. So chattels personal is a broad property term more or less corresponding to moveable property, part of a system more complex than the division between real and personal property, whereas personal chattels are the chattels personal a person owns, things like toilet articles, bags, umbrella. The Irish Senate appear to be discussing when a fish becomes a personal chattel. Or when it becomes a chattel personal? But they do quote the Administration of Estates Act 1925. If any Irish lawyers are reading this blog, they are offline for a couple of weeks, so I will have to leave it there.

The excellent and well-established online Translation Journal now has its own weblog (via Carob).

The idea of the weblog is to allow people to join in a discussion. It uses the Blogger comments system, that is, you can register and sign in or post anonymously.

Sonja Tomaskovic (excuse lack of diacritics) has a medical translation weblog, mainly in English but with some German and Croatian.
The weblog was originally here , where there are older entries (there may have been an earlier stage still). It’s now here.

Sonja’s website has a useful list of tools. She has a FURL page too. FURL, already mentioned by Handakte WebLAWg more than once, allows you to collect webpages online, at present free of charge. Weblinks that survive will direct you and others to the original site, but those that die will be saved. Amy Gahran’s Contentious weblog has more information on how she used FURL.

LATER NOTE: in a comment, Sonja points out that she will shortly be deleting her own weblog. A good opportunity to use FURL to preserve it if you want to!

In den USA heißt John Doe (oder Jane Roe usw.) “unbekannt”, z.B. in Anzeige gegen Unbekannt oder für jede andere anonyme Partei. In England kommt derselbe John Doe in fiktiven Fallbeispielen im Jurastudium vor.

Nun hat AP dieses nicht gewusst, so dass der Eindruck erweckt wird, Michael Jackson hätte was mit einem echten John Doe zu tun. Näheres in Carob, der auch Blick Online zitiert:

bq. Denn «John Doe» ist der englische Bruder von «Otto Normalverbraucher» und springt oft als Platzhalter für unbekannte Tote, erfundene oder anonyme Personen ein. Übrigens: John Doe hat auch eine Schwester – sie heisst Jane Doe.

Robin Stocks picked up the following wonderful story.

bq. Would the real John Doe please step forward?
This is lovely. A broad cross-section of the German and Austrian press has egg on its face today thanks to an overlooked translation error in a German news agency story about the trial of Michael Jackson. The latter stands accused of seducing a boy referred to for anonymity’s sake as John Doe. Accordingly, there are references to ‘John Doe and his family’ in the American press. Now, ‘John Doe’ of course means nothing to a German readership, but the German news agency, AP, failed to pick up on this and retained the name.

According to the Guardian:

bq. Doctors in some of the world’s poorest countries are being denied cheap life-saving drugs for patients because Brussels lacks enough linguists to translate a new patent law into the 20 languages of the European Union, the British government said last night.

Presumably, before the law was passed, they were being denied cheap life-saving drugs as a result of the inaction of the EU legislature?

bq. A spokeswoman for Mr Lamy said last night that translators in Brussels were doing their utmost to cope with the complex extra work caused by the enlargement of the EU from 15 to 25 countries this year, and promised the legislation would be ready in the autumn. “I don’t think there is more difficulty with this than with any other piece of legislation.”

And later:

bq. So far only Canada among developed countries has passed new laws, and Britain is unable to do so until primary legislation is agreed in Brussels.

I’m not sure that this is strictly a translation department problem. I presume they have a different team to ‘translate’ legislation, which is binding in all languages.