Today, September 26th, is the European Day of Languages. I discovered this by accident last week. It’s a spin-off of the European Year of Languages, which I do remember. The Council of Europe has information on it. Here’s the calendar showing more than 500 events from 40 countries:

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Shame about that. There was also a competition for a slogan for 2004 – winning three entries were Pack an extra language in your luggage; A world for living, languages for sharing; and Languages: a rainbow of colours and cultures. I find these mildly depressing

CILT has a page of what it calls ‘Celebrity linguists’, but not all of them actually say they speak a foreign language – some just think it’s a good idea.

The link to Linguist Online didn’t work either, but an abbreviated version took me to an article by Dan Brennan about how foreign footballers cope with language difficulties in their new country. (The Linguist is the journal of the Institute of Linguists):

bq. … for British players moving abroad, inability or reluctance to learn the language of their adopted country has often proved a major stumbling block. On being quizzed by the Italian media, Paul Gascoigne could, notoriously, only manage a belch by way of riposte. And former Liverpool legend Ian Rush revealed a possibly flawed adaptation strategy at his new club Juventus when he bemoaned the fact that ‘living in Italy was like living in a foreign country’. It will be interesting to see whether David Beckham will take a more enlightened approach at Real Madrid.

Perhaps I can pull myself together for St. Jerome’s day on September 30th (if I remember it).

Vertretbar.de (Sascha Kremer) reports that there has been a test of services offered by German local authorities online. I didn’t even realize you could register a change of address online. That would be very welcome. However, Fürth is described as ‘could do better’ (verbesserungswürdig), while Nurember gets top marks (vorbildlich).

Virtuelle Rathäuser online werden verglichen. Weitere Links bei Vertretbar.de.

The Juristisches Internetprojekt Saarbrücken (the best portal to start looking for German law, and it contains international links too) always has a link of the week. This week the link is porticolegal, described in German here (with past links of the week below).

Porticolegal offers news, statutes, case reports, literature, a search for lawyers, links to professional associations and universities, online journals and discussions forums, and much more.

The Deutscher EDV-Gerichtstag e.V. (German Association for Computing in the Judiciary) 12th conference is being held from 24th-26th September in Saarbrücken. The association’s website has German, English, French and Russian versions (very good English, translated by Jennifer Heuer).

The German weblog LAWgical is reporting in German. Several short reports on presentations are available there.

The German Edgar Pusch has been excavating in the Nile Delta for 25 years, on the site of the capital city of Rameses II (1290 to 1224 B.C.).

Among other things he has found a coloured gold floor, remains of a pharaonic palace and the oldest known raw glass production site.

His team has now found what they describe as a fragment from Rameses’ legendary cuneiform archives.

Photograph and more details in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten.

The German spelling is Ramses, but the Oxford Dictionary for Writers & Editors, which I usually follow, has Rameses.

The document is the first cuneiform text to be found in Egypt since 1888/1889. It is from archives of diplomatic documents and refers to the peace treaty between Rameses II and Hattusili III, king of the Hittites. This is the oldest known peace treaty.

It is not known if a road map was recovered.

In the new edition of Gabe Bokor’s online Translation Journal, there is an article on using a corpus of both original legal texts and also originals with translations in teaching students. Dr. Esther Monzó Nebot teaches at the Jaume I university in Castellón, Spain.

Dr. Monzó describes legal translations as needing to be overt translations, a term taken from Mary Snell-Hornby.

bq. Sometimes we must tell the reader ‘this is a translation’ so as to avoid making them think the Spanish rules are to be applied to an agreement signed in Great Britain. And this may happen if the agreement looks, sounds and feels like an original Spanish agreement. Such a reading may alter the interpretation of both the document and the intention pursued by the parties to it. In these cases, however, translators have their own strategies in order to mark (Hickey, 1998) the text, i.e. to give clues to the reader so that the reader may understand that the text being read, although written in Spanish, belongs to a different legal system. In this particular case of translation, there are also specific conventions the translator is bound by.

This is a problem often overlooked by legal translators; some of them concentrate on making the text sound natural in the target language and then the reader may have the impression that all the concepts mentioned are identical to those of the target language legal system.

She writes of the need for young translators to see examples of translations. They need not slavishly imitate these, but can compare and decide on their own strategy. This would be useful for practising translators too.

bq. …young and inexperienced translators have to work out on their own how to convey that necessary message to their readers, “How should I translate ‘High Court of Justice’ into Spanish so that my reader knows I am not talking about any Spanish court?” To think about such matters over and over again becomes nonsensical when we think of the number of people the world over who have at some time posed exactly the same questions, but this will be necessary as long as we refuse to show our work to trainees and peers.

It is true that legal translation often seems like reinventing the wheel.

The Spanish, Catalan and English corpus created by Dr. Monzó and Anabel Borjá will eventually be available on the Internet at http://www.cdj.uji.es. A couple of screenshots are given in the Translation Journal article.

LATER NOTE: Dr. Monzó would be happy to receive originals and/or translated text, if anyone wants to contribute to the project – texts in Spanish, Catalan, and English. Her email address can be found in the Translation Journal article.