I had one question about the ICC (last entry on the topic). The term ‘elements of crime’ in the Statute of Rome is rendered in the official German version as ‘Verbrechenselemente’.

I asked why not Tatbestandsmerkmale. I got an interesting answer but it left me confused. Dr. Kaup said, ‘I’m glad you asked this – it gives me a chance to say something about “elements of crime”‘. Apparently the elements of crime were added by the Americans (before they decided not to ratify the Statute!). They were insistent on having these elements. We in Germany don’t have such a thing. Elements are like a list of requirements, a checklist that you tick off (Mr Casey was invited to give a better definition, but this definition is OK). – I was told that German law and international law doesn’t look at offences like this. I said I don’t need to understand the English, I need to understand the German, but obviously that was of no interest to many of the audience, and Dr. Sheldon told me that it’s legal translation we’re talking about, and it isn’t just like translating Bleistift as pencil. Huh! That shut me up.

In my opinion, elements has two meanings. Either it means actus reus and mens rea (these are close to the German objektiver Tatbestand and subjektiver Tatbestand), or it means smaller components of both those.

For instance, theft is defined in English law as follows:

bq. A person is guilty of theft if he (1) dishonestly (2) appropriates (3) property (4) belonging to another (5) with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and ‘thief’ and ‘steal’ shall be construed accordingly.
Theft Act 1968, s. 1

You could say theft has either 5 elements, or 2 – the actus reus (which is numbers 2, 3, and 4) and the mens rea (which is number 1 and 5)

But the German definition of theft is not so different

bq. Wer eine fremde bewegliche Sache einem anderen in der Absicht wegnimmt, die Sache sich oder einem Dritten rechtswidrig zuzueignen, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu fünf Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft.
Strafgesetzbuch § 242
(A person who deprives another of movable property belonging to another with the intention of appropriating the property to himself or to another person shall be sentenced to imprisonment of up to five years or to a fine.)

Well, I need to look at a students’ textbook to see, but I think those elements are dealt with similarly in German.

Anyway, without pursuing that any further, I looked at the Statute again when I got home and saw that the elements of crimes were actually published as a separate document. I even mentioned this here, but without giving it much thought.

(I also saw that mental element (a more up-to-date version of mens rea) was translated as subjective Tatbestandsmerkmale). I wonder if they didn’t run out of vocabulary before adding the later elements of crime document.)

So we get in the Rome Statute, Article 6:

bq. For the purpose of this Statute, ‘genocide’ means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group,

and in the Elements of Crimes, we get:

bq. Article 6 (a)
Genocide by killing
Elements
1. The perpetrator killed2 one or more persons.
2. Such person or persons belonged to a particular national, ethnical, racial or
religious group.
3. The perpetrator intended to destroy, in whole or in part, that national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such.
4. The conduct took place in the context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct
directed against that group or was conduct that could itself effect such destruction.

I must admit, that makes sense to me. Why would it not make sense to the Germans? Well, it may be unusual in international criminal law, and it may be typical of civil law systems not to flesh things out in the statute, but I really think German criminal law and English criminal law are not far enough apart for elements and Tatbestandsmerkmale not to match up.

This was recommended by Polyglut a long time ago.

Bob the Angry Flower rails against the misuse of the apostrophe. You can also buy this cartoon as a coloured poster.

Unfortunately, Bob forgot to mention ‘its/it’s’, so there’s a later cartoon on that.

For over a week now, JURIST has had a column called Law in Today’s Foreign Press. Today’s entry gives links, inter alia, to the Independent story on the first woman law lord in Britain (sorry, that was the Guardian link – here’s the Independent one), Dame Brenda Hale, being appointed next year (vocabulary of lords and ladies has varied over the years). Other links are to Guardian reports on trademark claims in the European Court of Justice, and a new motor vehicle law being drafted in China under which motorists would be held liable for any traffic accident with a pedestrian.

Voice of America broadcasts in simplified English, called Special English. You can also listen to programs stored on the website or download them. Only 1,500 words are used, and you can download a file containing all the words.

I tried listening to a news broadcast but couldn’t stand it because every word was carefully separated from the next. That’s what a lot of Germans do when they learn English – they carry it over from German instead of running the words together. There would be little hope for them after listening to this.

I got this from Maddog, and it’s just a pretext for another Maddog link, totally off topic for me: the use of a ceramic fly on the urinal at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, to improve aim (with photo). Apparently this goes back to a bee in 19th-century England (the Latin word for bee, apis, being a pun). This link in turn I got from Transmogriflaw, who presumably has as little cause as I have to be interested in Dutch urinals.

Amazon.com has indexed some of the text of 120,000 books and you can search it. FAQ here.

You have to register and give a credit card number (for security reasons, they say) in order to use the feature, at least if you haven’t got an account. They haven’t indexed all the pages of any book. The publisher’s permission has to have been given, so some whole books or parts of books won’t be available. Still, I can imagine this being useful for a lot of translators, although its purpose is to show people enough of the books for them to decide whether to buy them or not (a bit like the present feature that shows you some pages of a book).

From Languagehat, who got it from MetaFilter.

An article in the Guardian on October 22nd indicates that language tests are to be used to screen migrants who seek asylum in Britain. There has already been a pilot test. This was announced by Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister:

She said that a pilot scheme of tests had been successful in proving that one in five of those claiming to be fleeing from Somalia had in fact come from another country.

These tests have been used in Australia and are very much criticized by forensic linguists, partly because so many people have moved around and do not speak according to whatever rules the testers establish.

There’s a report by language experts on the Australian procedure here.

They say that many people are unaware of the limitations of their own understanding of language.

Language is very much more complex than is often realised, and many statements about language can only be made with appropriate hedging. Many points that an ordinary person considers to be ‘obvious facts’ turn out under linguistic analysis to be half truths or worse. Consider for example the idea that ‘a noun is a word for a person, place, or thing’, ‘the word ‘cat’ is made up of three sounds’, or ‘acoustic analysis can create a voiceprint which identifies a person in a way similar to a fingerprint does’.
Many people would consider these to be truisms but in fact each of them has very serious limitations in linguistic analysis.

Later:

Consequently, linguistic research shows that a person’s nationality, ethnicity and/or place of origin normally cannot be determined solely on the basis of a few words in his or her speech. However, according to the RRT cases we examined in which details of the Agency LingID are given, many determinations in these reports were made precisely on this basis. For example, on the basis of one applicant using some “typical” Pakistani words and Iranian words, it was determined that he lived some time in these countries (N20). Another applicant was deemed to come from Pakistan on the basis of his use of one Urdu word, one Iranian word, and two words (Afghanistan and dollar) spoken with an Urdu accent (N7), another because of one Urdu word and pronouncing some words with an Iranian accent and some with an Urdu accent (N2), and yet another because of one Urdu word, pronouncing several words with a Pakistani accent, and using two Pashtu words and two English words (N28).

(Information from the Forensic Linguistics mailing list: International Association of Forensic Linguistics.