There are several kinds of multilingual legislative drafting: serial drafting, co-drafting / parallel drafting. Words like double, joint and alternate also crop up. Here is a memorandum, Technical Issues in Collaborative Multilingual Legislative Drafting, by William J. McIver Jr., a Canadian.

I am noting this because I picked up sounds of a few things I didn’t know at the Düsseldorf conference. The speaker was Agnieszka Doczekalska, on Drafting or translation – production of multilingual legal texts.

There’s something about this in Susan Šarčević’s New Approach to Legal Translation, a book I have never been able to get on with very well, probably mainly because its main topic is multilingual statutes. I tend to think of multilingual drafting as lawyers’, not translators’, work, although there is obviously some translation involved.

Another thing I know even less about is that statutory drafters in the EU meet up for conferences on XML. As far as I can tell, this is because it is relevant to software that assists drafting, and the XML differs from country to country. Here is Drafting Legislation Using XML at the U.S. House of Representatives. And here is a brochure on the Third Workshop on Legislative XML.

bq. Respondent maintains that it is a cat, that is, a well-known carnivorous quadruped which has long been domesticated. However, it is equally well-known that the common cat, whose scientific name is Felis domesticus, cannot speak or read or write. Thus, a common cat could not have submitted the Response (or even have registered the disputed domain name). Therefore, either Respondent is a different species of cat, such as the one that stars in the motion picture “Cat From Outer Space,” or Respondent’s assertion regarding its being a cat is incorrect.

Decision

Via Markenblog

Elsewhere, on dogs in Austria, Juristisches und Sonstiges, from Der Kurier.

I suppose one could compare the language in Austrian and English courts here, although the Austrian language did not come from the judge.

It’s great having so much literature on the Web, but I think something went wrong with the rhyme here:

bq. Unfortunately, nothing in this world is lasting; and the Golden Age was followed by another, not quite so prosperous, hence called the Silver Age, when the year was first divided into seasons, and men were obliged to toil for their daily bread.
“Succeeding times a silver age behold,
Excelling brass, but more excell’d by golf.
…Ovid (Dryden’s tr.)

Roger Chriss’s articles on Translation as a Profession were first written in 1995 and used to be recommended in the better days of FLEFO on CompuServe for new translators.

Now Roger has a website called Language Realm, with those articles (in the third edition) and other materials, especially for Japanese translators.

There are also glossaries, book reviews, and news items.

Betreten der Baustelle erwünscht.

Somehow I knew this was too good to be true.

Yes, it’s German asparagus time again. (Posted by request)