Category Archives: law

Brits can’t write legal Spanish/Briten sind unfähig, juristisches Spanish zu schreiben

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David Jackson has initiated legal proceedings in Spain. The other side seem a bit slow on the uptake and failed to notice Jackson was represented by a law firm. His lawyers replied, inter alia, that it must be blindingly obvious that Spanish lawyers wrote the correspondence, since it was impossible for British citizens to write clear technical and legal Spanish:

To which I have just spotted (in the middle of 55 pages of closely typed legal arguments) that our reply is:

(..)no se concreta “ en ningún momento , que se trata de un Despacho de Abogados” , ello no es asumible pues, por un lado, del contenido del escrito de alegaciones se infiere claramente su carácter técnico-jurídico, por lo que difícilmente lo podía redactar un ciudadano inglés(..)

Thanks to, er, Barcelona.

Links

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Current news from the EU: Presseurop site launched. Translations of news from various national papers, available in ten languages. Some of it has that airless translatorese feel of the Lufthansa in-flight magazine.

Nothing for Ungood is being translated into German and coming out as a book in December. No wonder we haven’t been getting enough to read on the site.

Trier University has links to strange cases from the USA and Germany. Lawhaha: Strange Judicial Opinions Lawhaha auf Deutsch

Linguee, LinearB

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I have mentioned Linguee and LinearB – see comments under the latter.

At first I disliked Linguee because I could not see where the texts came from without clicking through, and most of the English equivalents were bad. Admittedly this is not a full investigation, and readers are invited to do their own searches. My first impression of LinearB was good, because the sentences were good English, although they didn’t reveal the source at all.

I now realize that LinearB is full of Europarl, a database of bilingual documents from the proceedings of the European Parliament. Meanwhile it transpires that Linguee incorporates the acquis communautaire TM (I assume), and Europarl too. If I therefore look up the word Rechtsbehelf on both sites, I get masses of quite good EU equivalents, equivalents I could find myself on the Web anyway. Actually, it’s surprising that LinearB doesn’t use that material too.

I just looked at the example in the comments, Bestand as a noun, in Linguee and the results are not bad at all. I also think it is likely that Linguee is expanding and will expand fast. However, I suspect that when I have a genuine question to ask it, it will give me some more Gerglish and not much help.