The Kirchweih (annual fair) in Fürth takes over the whole town centre. The City Center shopping centre nearly wasn’t built because the entrance to the underground car park would have had to be blocked for 12 days once a year, but someone hit on the idea of a special traffic light and lane. There are temporary road markings all round the town during the Kirchweih and it’s not advisable to drive there if you don’t know your way around.

A German article in the Fürther Nachrichten reports that the law firm of Bauer and Neuhof (they haven’t even got a website) actually applied for an injunction to remove the mobile lavatory parked outside their offices. Apparently they backed down when it was moved by 2.5 metres. There’s a photograph in the article showing the situation.

bq. „Abgesehen vom Geruch sahen wir das auch als optische Belästigung und als Eingriff in den laufenden Gewerbebetrieb, denn so etwas ist ja nicht gerade einladend“, erklärt Neuhof, …

bq. (“Apart from the smell, we also saw it as a visual nuisance and as an intervention in our day-to-day business, because a thing like that isn’t exactly inviting,” says Neuhof,…)

Their offices are in a very elegant building, but obviously the visual aspect of 12 days’ Kirchweih in driving clients away had escaped me. The upshot is that the mayor would have voluntarily appeared in court to represent the interests of the people at the fair, and next year the toilets will be elsewhere, and their place will be taken by a caravan (why am I disappointed?). Other objections of this nature will not be tolerated.

Further to an earlier entry, Carob (a new translators’ blog in appearance if not in name – no permalinks though – by Caro and Robin Stocks) cites the Google address to which such spammers can be reported:

bq. Here’s where to report search engine spammers:

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

2004 is the year when Schöffen (lay judges / lay assessors) are elected in Germany (via Handakte WebLAWg). The German Ministry of Justice has some further links.

The Schöffen are not like jurors. They are chosen for a four-year period (I think – 2005 to 2008), have to be German and between 25 and 69 years old, and will sit in small panels with one or more professional judges. They will sit in the same combination repeatedly, so they will get to know the professional judge or judges they sit with, which may be a good thing or a bad one. One of the FAQs for Schöffen at www.schoeffen.de relates to dress – no prescriptions as to clothing can be made, although the Schöffen should not wear transparent blouses or very short trousers. The Schöffen in Bavaria can normally be spotted because they are the ones wearing jeans and pullovers.

Make sure to open this link in a new window if you want to come back: there is a new German law dictionary called Alpmann Brockhaus, and on this site you can download an extract (consisting of 5 pages given twice! but it’s worth looking at the diagrams, which other German law dictionaries haven’t got). It comes as a book, or as a book plus CD-ROM (from Handakte WebLAWg).

In Language Log, Mark Liberman and Chris Potts have been discussing this kind of sentence in the New Yorker:

“I would hope that, based on the President’s judicial nominations so far, you will see him appoint Justices more in line with a conservative judicial philosophy,” Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel to the American Center for Law and Justice, an advocacy group funded the Reverend Pat Robertson, says.
(Jeffrey Toobin. Advice and dissent. The New Yorker, May 26, 2003 (p. 48, column 1))

The peculiarity is the use of ‘Jay Sekulow … says’, rather than ‘says Jay Sekulow’.

In the latest entry, Liberman compares the distance between subject and verb here with that mocked by Mark Twain in ‘The Awful German Language’. He thinks (and I tend to agree) it causes more trouble for the reader than the German pattern does.

Here’s an example from Mark Twain:

“But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor’s wife met,” etc., etc. [1]
1. Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehüllten jetzt sehr ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten Regierungsräthin begegnet.
That is from The Old Mamselle’s Secret, by Mrs. Marlitt. And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe how far that verb is from the reader’s base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.

Michael Heng on AdvobLAWg defines konsolidiertes Gesetz. (This follows a comment by Der Schockwellenreiter ‘consolidated Act (whatever that means)’. Here’s the German – an English summary follows

bq. Gesetze werden im Bundesgesetzblatt veröffentlicht. Handelt es sich bei der Veröffentlichung um eine Änderung eines bestehenden Gesetzes, so werden nur die Änderungen abgedruckt, nicht aber das (gesamte) Gesetz in seiner neuen Fassung. Beispiel:
“Das Urheberrechtsgesetz […] wird wie folgt geändert: 1. Dem § 5 wird folgender Absatz 3 angefügt: […]” (vgl. aktuell das Gesetz zur Regelung des Urheberrechts in der Informationsgesellschaft, Bundesgesetzblatt Nr. 46 vom 12. September 2003 (S. 1774-1788) als PDF-Datei).
Der Volltext des Gesetzes in der geänderten Fassung entsteht dadurch, dass sich jemand die Arbeit macht und die Gesetzesänderungsanweisungen in die letzte aktuelle Fassung des Gesetzestextes einarbeitet. So entsteht die sog. “konsolidierte Fassung” des geänderten Gesetzes.

Statutes are published in the Federal Law Gazette. If an Act is amended, only the amendments are published, not the whole text, e.g.:

“The Copyright Act […] is amended as follows: 1. Section 5 is given the following subsection 3: […]”

The full text of the amended Act is prepared by someone who does the work of incorporating the amendments into the old Act. The result is the ‘consolidated version’.

This is a bit different from the English consolidated Act, which is a new Act collecting more than one earlier Act. As the Oxford Dictionary of Law (5th ed. – I haven’t got the 6th yet) says:

bq. consolidating statute: A statute that repeals and re-enacts existing statutes relting to a particular subject. Its purpose is to state their combined effect and so simplify the presentation of the law. It does not aim to alter the law únless it is stated in its long title to be a consolidation with amendments. … Compare codifying statute.

So the German term refers to working amendments into an old text, and the English one to collating various usually unamended statutes.