In a Financial Times article still online, the EU Savings Directive comes in for some criticism, particularly in connection with its having been translated into French and back again.

Council Directive 2003/48/EC of 3 June 2003 on taxation of savings income in the form of interest payments

Richtlinie 2003/48/EG des Rates vom 3. Juni 2003 im Bereich der Besteuerung von Zinserträgen

The directive was intended to tax EU citizens’ offshore savings, but after it was agreed with all 25 EU member states and with non-members (Switzerland, Liechtenstein), it had so many loopholes that not much tax will be collected.

bq. EU officials speak of “appalling” translation errors as the English version of the text was rendered into French and then back into English. Loopholes were inserted, including the glaring exemption from the tax of trusts and foundations. “The amount raised from withholding taxes in these offshore centres is tiny, but not surprising,” admits one EU official.

Rather like the typist’s error known to law firms, it seems to me that the translator’s error means a drafting choice.

I don’t know what the process was in this case or whether translators were involved, but I refer again to the Clarity articles I recently mentioned.

Some details from William Robinson’s article:

the first draft is written by the relevant technical department and must be in either English or French, which is not the native language of most of the drafters, who may also have little drafting experience and are inclined for both reasons to follow precedents uncritically

it is then examined by lawyers – I don’t know if these revisers are called lawyer-linguists, but William Robinson was a translator and is a reviser now. Problems are short deadlines and possible deference to the original department. Sometimes a team of editors in the Translation Directorate-General is consulted, but not always

the text is translated into all the official languages – it may be a complete mess at this stage – correction by legal revisers is again possible, but only to a limited extent:

bq. Since the text has passed through extensive consultations, is often the fruit of difficult compromises, has been translated into all the official languages and is to be adopted in a matter of days, the revisers must confine themselves to correcting formal or terminological errors and ensuring that the legal scope is exactly the same in the different language versions.

Ian Frame (same edition of Clarity) says that the European Parliament’s ‘legal revisers’ are the Council’s ‘jurist-linguists’.

Thanks to Robin Bonthrone (on the finanztrans mailing list at Yahoo)

Since I mentioned this case recently and there was a discussion in the comments, I now add that it’s available online at the BAILII site.

The case summarizes the legal framework. It also contains some information on the claimant’s background and unhappy childhood. Examples of behaviour of others in the office are under nos. 70 ff. From no. 79 on, evidence from another woman who had experienced the same treatment as the claimant, and who referred to other cases too. From 107 on, information on problems with a male colleague.

This certainly sounds like a case that would have been interesting to hear, with the witnesses acting evasively, if one reads between the lines.

On Delia Venables’ website, there is a page with links to legal journals and newspapers with some or all content available free online.

The Solicitors Journal has just relaunched its website and is worth looking at. It’s not to be confused with the Law Society Gazette, the official journal of the solicitors’ professional organization.

In addition to Delia’s list, Semple Piggot Rochez publish Consilio, for law students.

Here is a list of American law reviews, which I haven’t investigated further.

Liseuse has a second weblog, Il quaderno dei vocaboli.

Mainly in Italian, with some English and German.

The sidebar has links to a large number of glossaries. Good stuff.

Deutscher Artikel in der FAZ.

bq. Die britische Niederlassung der Frankfurter Großbank wurde am Dienstag wegen mutmaßlichen Mobbings gegen eine ehemalige Angestellte zu einer Entschädigungszahlung von 800.000 Pfund (1,2 Millionen Euro) verurteilt.

On July 15 I wrote about the word Mobbing (workplace bullying).

Today the Guardian reported on a case at Deutsche Bank in London under the heading City woman wins £800,000 damages over bank bullies. The article even uses the word mobbing, albeit in inverted commas:

bq. The court heard that four female co-workers had targeted Ms Green, who was a company secretary assistant at the bank, and she was regularly the target of their lewd and vicious comments.
One colleague told Ms Green she stank and blew raspberries at her as she walked by; she was regularly ignored and was forced to lock her work away in her drawers, or it would vanish. Her name was also removed from the firm’s global intranet directory.
She was the victim of a campaign of bullying or “mobbing” by the group of women, the court heard.

The court said that the managers took a very weak line.

bq. The judge said he was satisfied the bank was in breach of its duty of care to Ms Green. The bullying was a long standing problem, line managers knew or should have known about it and acted, and there were other victims, he said.
“The management was weak and ineffectual,” Mr Justice Owen said. “The managers collectively closed their eyes to what was going on, no doubt in the hope the problem would go away.”

Herbert Hopf kindly wrote out for me the titles of three EU directives which contain measures on harassment at work, inter alia:

– Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000 implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin
– Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000 establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation
– Directive 2002/73/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 September 2002 amending Council Directive 76/207/EEC on the implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women as regards access to employment, vocational training and promotion, and working conditions

Almost exactly 150 years after the Neanderthaler was found, we still don’t know much about them, but we do know what their language sounded like – or at least, one Ruth Omphalius thought up a Neanderthaler language for a German TV series. It has two-word ‘sentences’ and is loosely based on Inuktut, the language of the Inuit. “Igunartok!” is a general curse and approximates what the Neandertaler said on the occasion of a famous meeting (and not ‘Cro-Magnon man, I presume?’).

Neanderthalers always spoke with exclamation marks at the end, and their words started with capital letters, like German nouns.
Akrigeuyak! you idiot
Pokreitok! fool
Piktauyok! good
Nutkarpok! shut up

etc. etc.

(On this page, click on Mediathek. Look for Bilderserie: Sprechen Sie neandertalisch! – and in the clip Clantreffen im Neanderthal you can hear them speaking. If you ever meet any Neanderthalers, which is not very likely, you can recognize them from the mysterious background music that always accompanies them).

Exhibition in Bonn

(Indirectly via Handakte WebLAWg, where Rainer Langenhan links Neanderthalers to more recent residents of Düsseldorf)

Udo Vetter:

Neanderthal man / Der Neandertaler: