Category Archives: law

Shareholders/Gesellschafter

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The translation of forms of business association is quite complex and takes so long to discuss that the steam goes out of the boiler before the discussion has got off the ground.

I met some U.S. translators briefly last Friday, but not too briefly for one of them to tell me that all the U.S. lawyers she works for reject the translation of Gesellschafter of a GmbH as shareholder.

This is a good concrete example – without such examples it’s really impossible to discuss why some lawyers don’t like some translations (see earlier entry without examples).

It would be great if people asked their English-speaking lawyers why they don’t like the translation.

So, let’s look at this. Gesellschaft itself is a problem, but at least my favourite translation of GmbH, which is GmbH, is straightforward (until the client complains).

But the word Gesellschafter has to be translated. The nearest equivalents (not translations) of Gesellschafter in English are:

AG: shareholder
GmbH: member
KG: partner
OHG: partner

But look at this:
Aktie in AG: share
Anteil in GmbH: share

So it has become standard to translate every Gesellschafter of a limited company as a shareholder. Of course, it may seem like translatorese in a GmbH, but it seems a good solution to me. For some reason, hardly any Germans seem to have heard of the word members.

The U.S. lawyers who didn’t like shareholder apparently wanted members or partners. Members, OK, but never never never partners in a GmbH: it creates the wrong idea.

It’s been suggested to me that the lawyer familiar with two languages may simply be getting confused, and transferring the existence of two terms for shares (Aktie and Anteil) in German to a wrongly assumed existence of two terms in English.

Severance clause / Salvatorische Klausel

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Here’s a severance clause (severability clause, saving clause) from Mark Anderson, A-Z Guide to Boilerplate and Commercial Clauses:

If any provision of this agreement is prohibited by law or judged by a court to be unlawful, void or unenforceable, the provision shall, to the extent required, be severed from this agreement and rendered ineffective as far as possible without modifying the remaining provisions of this agreement, and shall not in any way affect any other circumstances of or the validity or enforcement of this agreement.

Plenty of other examples can be found online for harvesting elements to translate a German salvatorische Klausel.

The courts won’t always accept the clause, but it might help, for instance, where an employment contract has a clause in restraint of trade governing post-termination work.

I found salvatorische Klausel in the small Langenscheidt-Alpmann dictionary but not otherwise. Maybe that’s why DE>EN translators are always asking what it is.

At all events, the weblog verbraucherrechtliches … is looking at some inadmissible general terms and conditions and has an entry on salvatorische Klauseln.

Some clauses add nothing to the provisions of the Civil Code, but are harmless.
But this:

Anstelle der unwirksamen Bestimmungen gilt eine angemessene zulässige Regelung, die den angestrebten wirtschaftlichen Zweck weitgehend erreichen.

is apparently known as geltungserhaltende Reduktion and is NO GOOD. Consequences here.

Of course, this doesn’t relieve us from translating them into English.

Habeas corpus

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habeas.gif

You may not recognize him, but he’s been looking out for you.
Habeas Corpus has never had a very high profile, but for more than 700 years this quiet hero has stood watch over some basic principles of fairness and human dignity. When the Constitution was written, he was there. Since 1215, in fact, he’s been a humble, but unflagging, champion of justice and due process of law. …
Something happened last year, and now Habeas Corpus is missing.
Some time on the morning of October 17, 2006, Habeas disappeared. Eyewitness accounts say he was last seen in Washington, D.C., walking down the Capitol steps in something of a daze. But where he went from there, or where he is now, is anyone’s guess.
The one thing we know for certain is why he went missing. October 17 was the day that Congress let the president declare Habeas Corpus — and other parts of the U.S. Constitution — null-and-void for certain individuals.

No, I don’t think I’ve seen him either. More from the ACLU here.

(Via Boingboing)

Shooting star

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In my experience, a shooting star (in English) means someone or something that shines brightly for a few minutes and is then extinguished and falls to earth (the translation Eintagsfliege was suggested on pt, see below).

Certainly in German it is a wholly positive metaphor, applied to something that goes up and up rather than down and down. This despite the fact that meteors fall in the same direction in Germany as they do in Britain, and that is not up.

But maybe other English speakers have met the positive use? That is the impression I got when I last investigated the matter on Google.

Matthias in the pt group at Yahoo reported today on an interview with Hilary Hahn on the HR2 radio station. I don’t know if she was speaking German or interpreters were used – probably the former – but she’s a native speaker of English.

HH is full of praise for her collaboration with the conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

ANDREAS BOMBA: [explaining] … the shooting star from Venezuela …
HAHN: [indignant] No, I hope not! I hope he isn’t a shooting star.
BOMBA: [continues with his questions without reaction]

Richter

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No, not judges again, but the Richter scale. Following a small earthquake in Kent, John Wells points out that we usually pronounce Richter wrong:

Saturday’s minor earthquake in Kent meant that the newsreaders made several references to the Richter scale. As usual, they mostly pronounced it either [MM: in the German way or in an approximation of it]. But Charles Richter, the creator of the earthquale magnitude scale, was not from a German-speaking country, and the newsreaders’ otherwise admirable familiarity with German pronunciation is here misapplied. He was an American, born in Ohio. Being American, he naturally pronounced his name [MM: like Rictor, as in Victor] , and we should do the same …

I am not taking the time to reproduce the phonetic alphabet here, nor could I identify a permalink in John Wells’ weblog.

For German, Muret-Sanders and Collins both recommend the German pronunciation or the Rictor pronunciation.

das Erdbeben erreichte Stärke acht auf der Richter-Skala the earthquake registered eight on the Richter scale
© Langenscheidt KG, Berlin und München [Collins]

Unclogged English/Englisch enthollandisieren

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I see that today the Dutch Queen’s Day is being celebrated on the South Bank, so time to mention the presentation at the ITI conference on unclogged English last weekend.

Dr. Joy Burrough-Boenisch has spent many years editing scientific English written by native speakers of Dutch. Her book is Righting English that’s gone Dutch. Unclogged English is the name of her company.

This presentation was ideal for those of us living outside an English-speaking country. It all sounded very familiar: the unattributed alteration of one’s English in a non-grammatical direction before publication (the publishers I translate for don’t do that, but many do); the editors in Britain who have no framework to identify what has gone wrong because they don’t speak the foreign language that is causing interference (it was suggested that translators are the ideal people to train others to correct foreign English); the tendency of national ‘dialects’ of English to develop.

Joy mentioned two organizations that are attempting to train translators and others in mainland Europe in editing and negotiating: SENSE (Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors in the Netherlands) and MET (Mediterranean Editors and Translators).

The idea of this editing is not to turn everything into perfect British or U.S. English: some globalization is necessary.

I was particularly interested in considering tactics as to how to approach authors. It strikes me as easier to make a plan if I recognize that German authors are increasingly going to have my English reviewed by non-native speakers and that this is an international phenomenon, I will be more likely to devise some rules of etiquette and consider how to phrase comments to the author, rather than seguing into a rant about stupid foreigners who think they can write English. (Recent example: I was asked to change ‘in more detail’ into ‘more in detail’).

It will be worth following the activities of these organizations. Links on the sites.

One thing I’d like to know more about is typical differences in sentence structure between German and English. I change sentences around but am not conscious of a technique. Grammatical and vocabulary differences are much more obvious to me.