Category Archives: law

New legal translation blog

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I am excited to announce that Thomas West has been running a legal blog for a couple of months – I have only just seen it.
The blog can be accessed from his website, www.intermarkls.com.
Most of the posts so far are on Spanish to English legal translation, but there will certainly be posts on German coming, on German law and Swiss law above all.

The opening post in 2014 is headed 10 Ways to Improve Your Legal Translations – it contains a lot of useful advice:

3. Beware of British terminology in the bilingual dictionaries:
High Court (a court of first instance in England, but used by American journalists to refer to the United States Supreme Court)
locus standi (this is called “standing” in the United States)
Rules of the Supreme Court (this is the equivalent of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States)

Yes, I remember being surprised to read the US press writing about ‘the high court’.

Be careful not to assume that the photograph of the former King Juan Carlos of Spain, who has been testing the adage ‘The King can do no wrong’, with Tom, who looks different and as far as I know has done less wrong.

The post Costas, costes y costos reminded me that in England we talk about court fees and lawyers’ costs. There used to be a term taxation of costs, meaning review of the necessity of costs, where a court officer, called a taxing officer (this gives the word taxing at least three meanings), reviews whether the solicitors had overcharged (the service is only available in connection with a court case, but the court’s fees, of course, cannot be challenged in the same way). The term has apparently been changed to detailed assessment since 1998. However, taxing officers and taxation orders are still so called. Here’s the Law Society on making a complaint about your solicitor’s bill.

Zur vollsten Zufriedenheit: voll verwirrend für Übersetzer

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Beck Blog (Prof. Dr. Markus Stoffels) reports on a recent decision:

Unzufrieden mit „voller Zufriedenheit“? BAG äußert sich zur Leistungsbeurteilung in Zeugnissen

in which the Federal Employment Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) found it was acceptable for an employee to receive the equivalent of Grade 3 on the six-grade scale because this is the average grade).

Die Note 1 wird mit der Formulierung „stets zur vollsten Zufriedenheit“, die Note 2 mit „stets zur vollen Zufriedenheit“, die Note 3 mit „zur vollen Zufriedenheit“ und die Note 4 mit „zur Zufriedenheit“ zum Ausdruck gebracht.

An employee who wanted a better grade had to show evidence it was deserved.

One sometimes wonders how to translate these terms, where ‘satisfactory’ is quite negative. The non-German recipient ought to be informed of the code used, but I can’t see any other way to translate it except literally (I have actually refused to translate references of this kind in the past).

According to Wikipedia:

Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Bulgaria are the only countries in Europe where employees can legally claim an employment reference, including the right to a correct, unambiguous and benevolent appraisal.

Meanwhile, as English is used more and more widely, the Frankfurter Allgemeine is worried about unfortunate phrases in bad English:

Es gibt Empfehlungen, die mehr schaden als nützen: „He left us with enthusiasm“ oder „You will be lucky to have him to work for you“ gehören zweifellos dazu – besonders wenn sie als gutgemeinte Abschiedsformeln am Ende eines englischen Arbeitszeugnisses stehen.

Here’s the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the same topic (interview with Professor Arnulf Weuster):

Der Bewerber war “attentive to detail”, ein Pedant also. Der Vorgesetzte bescheinigt ihm Flexibilität. Schade nur, dass “flexible” auch “unentschlossen” heißt. Deutsche Arbeitszeugnisse ins Englische zu übersetzen, ist tückisch. Arnulf Weuster, Professor an der Hochschule Offenburg, hat Ratgeber zum Thema verfasst. Trotzdem hält er es letztlich für unmöglich, alle Feinheiten der Zeugnissprache zu übertragen.

And here’s Toytown Germany discussing it.

German Civil Code/BGB-Kommentar kostenlos online verfügbar

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Below I post parts of a press release from Karriere-Jura GmbH, which is publishing the German text and a commentary to the German Civil Code free of charge online. There is no need to register.

The whole Code is online, but only some parts have been given commentaries so far – for a list and links see in the German text below.

The publisher is encouraging lawyers to post comments to the sections, which obviously has an advertising effect. For an example, scroll down on the page to § 1371.

This should be very useful for translators. Sometimes a text deals in great detail with a section of the BGB and a commentary is the ideal source of information. But more on commentaries in a future post.

Der Online-Kommentar macht … konsequent von den Möglichkeiten des Internets Gebrauch (Details).

Hinzu tritt ein gravierender Unterschied im Konzept: Da zusätzlich zu den Fachinformationen für Juristen auch eine eigene Rubrik für den Rechtsverkehr veröffentlicht ist, wird mit Kommentar-untypischen Nutzerzahlen von bis zu einer Million Lesern jährlich gerechnet.

Bislang ist noch nicht jede Norm kommentiert. Der Verlag freut sich daher über Anfragen von Autoren, die sich zutrauen, bis zu drei Normen in hoher Qualität zu kommentieren.

Verfügbar sind z.B. bereits Kommentierungen zu folgenden §§: 80 ff. (Stiftungen); 712 ff. (Gesell­schafts­recht); 1004; 1371 ff. (Familien­recht); 611 ff. (Ar­beits­recht), 631 ff. (Werk­vertrags­recht).

Bitte beachten Sie auch das Geleitwort von Prof. Dr. iur. Dr. iur. habil. Gerrick Frhr. v. Hoyningen-Huene, das Sie hier finden: Zum Geleitwort.

Die offizielle Adresse des Kommentars lautet:

BGB.Kommentar.de

Virtual synonyms: breach, violation or non-performance

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‘Breach, violation or non-performance’ is just an example of the kind of problem encountered by translators working out of English. I have met native speakers of German who prefer to work into English largely to avoid this problem of contract translation.

What do the doublets or triplets mean? Probably the lawyer who drafted the contract wasn’t sure but used an established phrase.

How can you find out if they are synonyms or not?

Books on using plain language in the law can be helpful, because they sometimes say which doublets are synonyms and which aren’t. For instance, Mellinkoff, Legal Writing: Sense and Nonsense has an appendix B which lists coupled synonyms.

acknowledge and confess
act and deed
annual (sorry, should read ‘annul’)and set aside
authorize and empower
conjecture and surmise
covenant and gree (should read ‘agree’)

and many more.

The problem is mentioned by Enrique Alcaraz and Brian Hughes in Legal Translation Explained:

There is, of course, the possibility that the original phrase contains a mere tautology exhibiting neither subtlety nor rhetorical aptness, i.e. what is sometimes called ‘a distinction without a difference’. If this is the translator’s conclusion, there would seem to be two options open: silent simplification by dropping the less general term, or simple reproduction. Lawyers, after all, are not always breathtakingly compelling speakers or writers, and it is likely that most languages would tolerate literal renderings of rather weak pairings like ‘final and conclusive’, even if conscious stylists would not applaud them. On the other hand, the doublet ‘alter and change’ is a candidate for simplification to the equivalent of ‘alter’ or, alternatively, to some such treatment as ‘alter in any way’.

The problem is also addressed in this paper:


Exploring near-synonymous terms in legal language. A corpus-based, phraseological perspective
Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski.

Abstract:

This paper aims to determine the extent to which a corpus-based, phraseological approach can be effectively applied to discriminate
among near-synonymous, semantically-related terms which often prove troublesome when translating legal texts. Based on a substantial multigenre
corpus of American legal texts, this study examines the collocational patterns of four legal terms ‘breach’, ‘contravention’, ‘infringement’ and ‘violation’, first in the genre of contracts and then in the multi-genre context of the entire corpus. The findings highlight the
area of overlap as well as specificity in the usage of these terms. While collocational constraints can be argued to play an important
disambiguating role in the semantic and functional analysis of both source and target text items carried out by translators prior to the
interlingual translation, this study emphasizes the applicability of the phraseological approach to English source texts.

I’ve long been tempted by the idea that computer study of collocations could help translation problems. But I’m not really sure. At all events, the author see this study as merely the beginning of an approach to analysing legal synonyms and near-synonyms.

The collocational information can be treated as a clue or a prompt to evoke a generic scenario in which a particular legal concept functions. Such is the case of breach, which reflects a unity of domain and genre with a well-defined and homogenous class of objects this term refers to. Similarly, the use of infringement is marked by domain-specificity. This tendency for certain legal terms to co-occur with other terms or phrases marked by semantic resemblance could also be accounted for by referring to the concept of semantic preference (Stubbs, 2001). In contrast, violation cuts across legal domains and genres and it is the most ‘inclusive’ of all the terms. Finally, contravention illustrates a heavy phraseological restriction to virtually one form of (a) phrase.