Die IHK Darmstadt empfiehlt, Bankkaufmann z.B. mit “Bank Management Assistant” zu übersetzen. (Kaufmann im Sinne des HGB würde ich mit “merchant” übersetzen, auch wenn manchmal eine zusätzliche Erklärung nötig ist).

The Darmstadt chamber of commerce has a document online with a list of suggestions for translating words like
Automobilkaufmann Automobile Sales Management Assistant
Bankkaufmann Bank Business Management Assistant
Bürokaufmann Office Management Assistant

These are job titles that always present problems. I think the idea of ‘management assistant’ is a good one, even if it doesn’t solve all problems.

bq. Wir bitten darum, diese Übersetzungen zu benutzen, selbst wenn in offiziellen Dokumenten des Wirtschaftsministeriums noch die unzutreffende Bezeichnung “clerk” verwendet wird.
Wir würden es begrüßen, wenn Sie weitere eigene Übersetzungen nach diesem Schema mit dem DIHK abstimmten.

(Please use these translations, even if official documents from the Hessen Ministry of Economics still use the incorrect term ‘clerk’.
We would be happy if you would agree on translations of your other terms with us.)

For Kaufmann in the sense of someone subject to the Commercial Code, I would use merchant, although this might need explanation.

I suppose we are still getting words from French. The toilettage of texts isn’t what blocks up the drain. To quote the Sugar Traders Association (look, no apostrophe – hope Lynne Truss doesn’t see this – I think it’s a good idea to omit apostrophes in names of institutions like this):

bq. 30 May 2001 – Details of EU sugar regime compromise have been published on Europa’s RAPID database. Now the sugar regime has been agreed, the legislation will be tidied up (“toilettage”) by the SCA at their meetings on 6th and 12th June, adopted as an “A” point at the Farm Council on 18th June and shortly afterwards published in the Official Journal as a Council Regulation.

BBC News picks it up too:

bq. And before we get there, the legal texts have to be translated and double-checked in a myriad of languages – a process given the faintly unpleasant name of toilettage, or cleaning-up.

In French itself, in face, toilettage appears to mean grooming a dog.

Mark Liberman of Language Log touches on the question of redundancy in legal language.

One focus of redundancy is coupled synonyms, to quote Mellinkoff’s term:

bq. A long habit of coupling synonyms persists in American legal usage, e.g. authorize and empower, null and void, true and correct. The habit is compounded of antiquated literary style, the mixture of languages we now call English, the lawyer’s gamble on venial repetition against mortal omission, and a misplaced reliance on the precision of what has endured.

(Mellinkoff’s Dictionary of American Legal Usage – see this comparison of law dictionaries)

Mellinkoff has a long list, as does Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, under Doublets, Triplets, and Synonym-Strings. Garner mentions the theory that a Latin word was paired with an Anglo-Saxon one for wider comprehension (acknowledge and confess, act and deed, goods and chattels); the rhetorical elements; and the element of ignorance, where the writer doesn’t know the exact definition of any of the terms and so throws them all in. Some of these doublets/couplets are terms of art and most are purely redundant, but even in the latter case, an inventive court may surprise the lawyers by construing shades of meaning, especially if the doublet is a rare one.

The New Yorker has a review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (see earlier entry) by Louis Menand. This is a much more careful demolition job than mine. Menand points out inconsistencies in punctuation and that the book was not adapted for the American market. So many books are adapted, far too many, and yet here, where the punctuation rules are different, no changes were introduced.

The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’’s writing is its inconsistency.

How true this rings. Oh, the times I used to tell my students, ‘You can’t do that. You know, the Americans are even more pedantic than we British are.’ Did they believe me? No – because pedantry is bad and Americans are good. Or if I said, ‘The Americans divide words differently from the British’, it was ‘You don’t like the Americans, do you, because you keep mentioning them.’ (We accepted both BE and AmE from German students, as far as we could, and we had both British and American staff, with the odd Australian or Irish person).

via Language Log.

Desbladet appropriately links to a Monty Python sketch on a team of German philosophers, playing the ancient Greeks.

If you click on the next page, skip over the Bomber Harris interlude quickly, in view of the fact that the dome was put on the Frauenkirche in Dresden today and the Duke of Kent said some words in German.

bq. Obviously the manager Martin Luther has decided on all-out attack, as indeed he must with only two minutes of the match to go. And the big question is, who is he going to replace, who’s going to come off. It could be Jaspers, Hegel or Schopenhauer, but it’s Wittgenstein! Wittgenstein, who saw his aunty only last week, and here’s Marx.
(Marx begins some energetic knees-up running about)

There is an article in the Financial Times on weblogs, but it will not be available free much longer. It’s by Patti Waldmeir, an American correspondent, and is entitled A stretch in the virtual stocks for the global village gossip. Thanks to Robin Bonthrone for the reference.

The main interest in the article is the danger of publishing personal or confidential information online, and at the same time it suggests to employers that they should not be too quick to sack an employee who goes too far. It starts from the well-known example of Heather Hamilton (dooce – but look at earlier entries than today’s for the real flavour). It also mentions the danger of webloggers being dishonest in order to avoid problems.

bq. But the issue is not just whether we are wasting time or bandwidth: the bigger question is about freedom. Politicians are far less free than normal people, says Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, because their every utterance is searched and scrutinised for infelicities. To satisfy that scrutiny, they must always be their public selves, without the luxury of lapsing into private bad behaviour.

bq. Bloggers risk the same peculiar loss of privacy, he says: when every idiocy uttered is permanent – and searchable – individuals may have no choice but to present a sanitised public self in place of the real one. The result is much less freedom; only the man without a blog can be free to think as he pleases.

As a self-employed person, I don’t risk being sacked. But as someone offering my services, I don’t want to make a bad impression. This is not a private and personal weblog. Of course I don’t mention clients and jobs, but it would be in my interest not to offend other translators either (and that includes on mailing lists, UseNet groups and elsewhere).

One thing, for instance, that I promised myself when I started here was not to make fun of bad translations. It seems to me that if I show up a bad translation done by someone else, it reflects badly on me too, and it also makes non-translator and customer readers associate the very process of translation with errors. And every time I mention a mistake, someone is going to be offended, probably for quite mistaken reasons. But this doesn’t stop me from doing it. In fact, it’s inevitable I’m going to comment on language peculiarities from time to time. I suppose the problem may be not criticizing enough rather than criticizing too much.