Two mosque leaders in Albany, New York, accused of supporting terrorism, may have been the victims of a translation error, according to Yahoo News:

bq. [Prosecutors] said a word on one page, written in Arabic, referred to Aref as “commander.” In fact, the word was Kurdish, and could be translated as “brother,” according to prosecutors.

bq. Reviewing the page for the newspaper, Nijyar Shemdin, the U.S. representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington, said he did not see how a translation would have come up with the word “commander.” He also said Aref was referred to with the common honorific “kak,” which could mean brother or mister.

The New York Times also reports, with more details (this was all part of a sting operation).

bq. However, many of the conversations between the informant and the men were in Urdu, as well as in Arabic and English, and Mr. Kindlon said there might be problems with the translations of those meetings, as well.

bq. In court documents, the government provided only snippets of the conversations already translated.

Thanks to John Lynch of the Forensic Linguistics list.

When I was in London recently I picked up a copy of Nigel Foster’s Austrian Legal System and Laws, ISBN 1-85941-757-4
It cost £35 (amazon.de is offering it from 85.95 euros, which is worrying)

There is also Hausmaninger, The Austrian Legal System 3rd ed., ISBN 3-214-00289-9

I have only the first edition of Hausmaninger, dated 1998. That has less substantive law than Foster. But I don’t know if the later editions are fuller.

Maybe books on ‘smaller’ legal systems concentrate more on the framework. They expect you to know a lot about German-language civil law (and criminal law) from books about German law. That was the impression I got from a book on Canadian law, that it wanted to spare me the basics: Stephan Handschug, Einführung in das kanadische Recht, 2003, ISBN 3-406-50826-X – a lot about constitutional matters in there (perhaps the more so since the written constitution is relatively recent).

Kenneth A. Adams, A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, has been published by the American Bar Association Press. At the book’s site, you can see the table of contents, and there are also articles by the author. The site also tells you how to get hold of the book – it was only published in July 2004, so it’s rather scarce as yet.

From the back-cover blurb:

bq. The focus of this manual is not what provisions to include in a given contract, but instead how to express those provisions in prose that is free of the problems that often afflict contracts. This manual highlights common sources of inefficiency, dispute, and misunderstanding and recommends how to avoid them. It offers a level of practical detail not found elsewhere in the literature on drafting.

I see the author originally studied medieval archaeology at York University.

(via Mark Adler of Clarity)

Süddeutsche Zeitung am 11. August:

bq. Erst nach und nach jedoch wird offenbar, wie sehr das Aus für den kleinen Münchner Spezialstudiengang das Ausbildungs-Modell für Übersetzer und Dolmetscher in ganz Bayern in eine Schieflage bringt. Händeringend suchen Berufsstand und Kultusbeamte nun nach einer Lösung.

bq. Dass die Misere entstehen konnte, hat seinen ursprünglichen Grund nicht in der Eilentscheidung der FH, sondern liegt an einer bayerischen Besonderheit. Überall sonst in Deutschland ist die Ausbildung von Übersetzern und Dolmetschern ein akademisches Studium, das bundesweit acht Universitäten und fünf Fachhochschulen anbieten. In Bayern dagegen wird sie der beruflichen Bildung zugeschlagen und ist an Fachakademien angesiedelt. Fünf gibt es in Bayern, zwei davon in München. Die dreijährige Ausbildung endet mit einer staatlichen Prüfung, die jährlich mehrere Hundert ablegen. Wer wollte, konnte bislang an der FH noch ein viersemestriges Studium draufsatteln, um das Diplom zu machen.

I mentioned in an earlier entry that the Munich Fachhochschule translation course is closing.

Richard Schneider’s Nachrichtenportal at the Übersetzer-Portal links to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that appeared on August 11th on the topic.

The curious thing about this article is that it laments the loss of something that never really got off the ground. Richard Schneider is also of the opinion that Bavaria needs a university translation course. Germany, says the article, has eight universities and 5 Fachhochschulen offering an academic course. Bavaria has five Fachakademien offering a vocational course.

The article points out that the current Bavarian Fachakademie qualification is recognized by some British universities, so students can get a British MA. That’s one of the anomalies now. Qualifications are very important in Germany. And lack of them may have a long-term effect on your salary. You can get an MA in Germany and go grey achieving it. You can get one in Britain in a year, if you can pay the fees and do the work.

Antje Kopp, Vice-President of the BDÜ, forecasts that court interpreters will soon need an academic qualification (she refers to a Green Paper of the EU commission on the harmonization of criminal procedure). In which languages, I wonder?

Language hat links to a superb list of names of European cities in several languages at wordiq.com, via a comment from vicente at Pepys’ Diary.

Here’s Athens:

bq. Afiny (Russian, Ukrainian), Ateena (Finnish), Aten (Norwegian, Swedish), Atena (Croatian, Romanian), Atenas (Portuguese, Spanish), Atēnas (Latvian), Atene (Italian), Atenes (Catalan), Atény (Czech, Slovak), Ateny (Polish), Athen (Danish, German, Norwegian), Athén (Hungarian), Athene (Dutch), Athènes (French), Athény (alternative Czech name), Athína – Αθήνα (Greek), Atīnā (Arabic), Atina (Bulgarian, Serbian, Turkish)

Many names are like this, just spelling variations, although Turkish is often good for a surprise, and I didn’t know Istanbul was Miklagard in Old Norse.

I would have said Braunschweig, not Brunswick, in English, and Hannover (Hanover for the dynasty, though), and I would say Auschwitz is only used for the concentration camp, not the town.

LATER NOTE: There was a trackback to this entry by Wortfeld, from which I realized that the list of names is in Wikipedia, and may well have started there.

I hope the title is correct. I don’t understand that much Italian, although I can get through the Marriage of Figaro or La Traviata.

Via my referrers: Frenetica fannullona (who says there is a provincial saint of translators called Luciano Bianciardi, although I find him described only as a writer), and from her blogroll:

fogliedivite
cittadina del mondo
botteghe color cannella

and following those blogs’ blogrolls,
This land is my land, by Anna FDD – she writes in English
Verba manent /Zu