A possibly Bulgarian questioner at ProZ has posted a civil engineering question: what is abstemmen in English? (It’s usually chisel off) Context: Decke-Wand Überstände abstemmen.

This question is marked as potentially offensive (that’s why I looked at it):

bq. Note: The asker has indicated that this question may be regarded as offensive by some. It has not been sent by email or displayed in site lists.

I’m disappointed. Or perhaps I’m just ignorant.

Fotos zeigen die Arbeit von Philippe Gratier, einem EU-Dolmetscher.

BBC news presents a Photo journal: Breaking down the EU language barrier showing the working life of Philippe Gratier, an interpreter for the EU.

Thanks to Desbladet for the link (despite the excitement leading up to Friday’s royal wedding).

Vorbemerkung auf Deutsch: kennt jemand ein Wörterbuch (nur deutsch) oder Buch über das Aufsetzen von Gesetzesentwürfen, wo die Bedeutung von entsprechend und sinngemäß besprochen wird?

How to translate entsprechend or sinngemäß in German statutes.
I will approach this in a number of stages:
1 The short answer (my current opinion)
2. Background of the problem
3. The problem with accordingly
4. The meaning of entsprechend and sinngemäß in German legislation
5. The Eichmann trial
6. Bilingual legal dictionaries

1. The short answer
In BE, use with the necessary modifications
In AmE, possibly analogously.

|entsprechend, sinngemäß|with the necessary modifications BE|
||mutatis mutandis (archaic)|
||analogously AmE|

For support for this, read on!

Does anyone know any dictionary or book on drafting or reading statutes that discusses any of these terms in German or English? The opinion of a German draftsman would be welcome.

2. Background
This question has come up for the third time in the past year or so. The latest question was: can we use accordingly, which is common in BE statutes? I am very grateful to two anonymous Parliamentary draftsmen contacted via the Forensic Linguistics list and someone else who has been involved with drafting in the past.

Here are the main words/phrases involved in the discussion:
entsprechend
sinngemäß
mutatis mutandis
accordingly
with the necessary modifications
with the necessary changes
analogously

3. The problem with accordingly

Entsprechend can often be translated in general texts using accordingly or correspondingly. But its meaning is different in legal texts (mutatis mutandis – see below for more details) and accordingly doesn’t have that meaning.

However, accordingly is frequently used in British statutes. So I tried to find parliamentary draftsmen. I was lucky in that I had help and received three replies (forwarded on anonymously). Continue reading →

Aus Mitteilungen, Münchner Anwaltverein e. V.

bq. Der auf dem Bauch liegende Spruchkörper nimmt den Parkettboden in Augenschein. Vor dem Fenster befindet sich in einem Abstand von ca. 60 cm zur Balkonfront Spuren von Verkratzungen.

bq. The court, whose members are lying on their stomachs, inspects the parquet flooring. In front of the window, at a distance of c. 60 cm from the front of the balcony, are traces of scratches.

Isabella Massardo at Taccuino di traduzione has as much trouble with the word spookrijder as I do with the word Geisterfahrer. Apparently she was fined for cycling in the wrong direction on a cycling path. The German word (and possibly the Dutch too) applies only to motorways. Anyway, in Erlangen you can see cyclists at night cycling in the wrong direction without lights, or when it’s raining, with an umbrella in one hand and the other on the handlebars.

bq. Ora, come tutti sanno da queste parti, il termine spookrijder (formato da spook, fantasma, e rijder, conducente) indica un automobilista che va contromano (il Van Dale oldandese aggiunge: in una strada a senso unico, in particolare in autostrada). Il Van Dale olandese-inglese dà come traduzione ghost-driver (da prendere cum grano salis), mentre il Van Dale francese-olandese si limita a fornire una descrizione: voiture / conducteur roulant à contresens.

Apparently the term ‘ghost driver’ does exist in English, but it’s not as universally used as the German term. I suspect there are a high proportion of them in Germany. On the radio, they say, ‘Es kommt Ihnen ein Fahrzeug entgegen’ (A vehicle is coming towards you), which always sounds mysterious to me.

Here’s a mysterious site with some vocabulary.

Nützliche Links für deutschsprachige Ausländer in England befindet sich auf der eXil Site.

The site eXil has a lot of useful-looking links for Germans, Austrians and German-speaking Swiss living in Britain.

bq. Exil versteht sich als Treffpunkt für deutschsprachige Londoner. Ob Schweizer, Deutsche, Österreicher, Namibierin oder einfach nur Londoner, es geht hier nicht um Heimatkunde oder gefühltes ‘Anderssein’, sondern ganz einfach darum sich in der gemeinsamen Sprache über die alltäglichen und nicht-alltäglichen Dinge im Leben hier in London auszutauschen. Dass dabei gelegentlich die Vorzüge langer Sätze, der Mangel an gutem Brot, und die Erleichterung bei Rot über die Ampel gehen zu dürfen angesprochen werden sei selbstverständlich.