Louise Frances Denyer, of (or connected with) Birmingham University, has a PDF on the Web of an 85-page paper (about half of it consists of appendices with language examples):
Corpus study carried out on three ‘legal’ verbs to demonstrate their similar and different usage for the purposes of legal translators and lawyer-linguists.

The paper aims to show the valule of corpus studies in translation and legal-language teaching. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but unfortunately the corpora used, which are English, Spanish and French, don’t appear to be specifically legal texts. The three verbs were chosen because the author’s students wanted to know more about them – I remember this problem with another collection of verbs mentioned here: abolish, override, set aside, quash etc.

The following is really only based on skimming the article:

Breach often collocates with peace, security, contract, confidentiality, rules, rights, and fiduciary (MM: should be fiduciary duty, not just ‘breach of fiduciary’ as suggested).

Violate collocates with rules, codes, covenants, terms, prohibitions, and court injunction; also with airspace. It is very common in connection with US constitutional rights, whereas in British English it can relate to minor offences.

Infringe collocates with IP rights, such as patents, copyrights, fundamental rights.

I found this article via the programme of a conference on corpus linguistics in Murcia this week, tweeted by Matthew Bennett, seeing the topic and then Googling the author’s name.

I have got a book on corpora that seems very good, but I am only part-way through it: Working with Specialized Language. A practical guide to using corpora, by Lanne Bowker and Jennifer Pearson, Routledge 2002.

Walt Disney did Pinocchio a great disservice. A new English translation by Geoffrey Brock sounds as if it puts things right.

Interesting podcast interview Tim Parks at the New York Review of Books – scroll down.

Collodi was very much about the unification of Italy, but this aspect has gradually been ironed out of the book for children.

Observer review.

(My copy of Tim Parks’ A Season with Verona is being held captive by a football fan in Erlangen).

Thanks to Trevor.

Further to the recent entry on The web as dictionary, a Swiss site has a form for multilingual web searches for translators.

This will find sites with more than one language. You choose a combination of EN with DE, ES, FR, IT, NL, PT or SV, and you have further choices – for instance, in German you can choose sites in DE/CH/AT – but apparently not individual countries. Thus if I were translating from Swiss German, I might search for CH sites or UK sites (the UK option isn’t given).

Via Jost Zetzsche’s newsletter.

Learn to speak a bit of Gothic on Youtube.

via languagehat

Fürther Nachrichten reports that one 77-year-old man is not prepared to sell his listed building, which is central to the shopping centre plans. He is a lawyer who was born there and doesn’t want to sell for personal reasons. He lives in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, another town where I doubt they will put a big shopping centre in the middle. (Can we contribute to his health insurance?) He apparently reacted the same way I did: how can they possibly consider integrating a previously public street into a private project?

(There’s a report in the Fürth section of the paper too, which isn’t online, as far as I can tell, and on p. 3 of the Fürth section there are reactions, including a short article on the Park Hotel and another on no. 12: it has belonged to a family for five generations).

This was common knowledge, I thought. The building in question, I seem to remember, is number twelve – yes, this is confirmed by the photo in the printed version of the paper (they’ve stopped putting photos online!) – these are my photos taken today:

This is to the right of the cinema. It has a popular takeaway pizza shop , a clothes shop, a hairdresser and a nice jewellery shop on the ground floor, an architect on the first floor, and a Turkish organization somewhere inside. (Photos taken this morning).

The mayor said that if you had to choose one building that would hit the Neue Mitte where it really hurts, this would be it (‘Wenn man die Neue Mitte im Herzen treffen wollte, dann musste (müsste?) man sich dieses Gebäude aussuchen’).

It sounds to me as if the project is over. Sonae Sierra are prepared to discuss for the next four weeks or so whether another passageway is possible. It confirms what I gathered, that the size of the centre is vital to their plans, and they need to demolish this house to create enough space on that side of the street. I can’t imagine they will go along with the suggestions of a smaller-scale shopping centre.

There is also a commentary in the paper: Kein Grund zur Schwarzmalerei, and the Stadtheimatpfleger has already posted a PDF file on the subject.