Category Archives: translation

Gesetzesvorbehalt

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There’s a term in German constitutional law, Gesetzesvorbehalt, literally (reservation/requirement of a statute).

On Legally Yours, Rob Lunn discusses the equivalent Spanish concept. How to translate “reserva de ley” into English (using a descriptive strategy).

In my database I find a suggestion to translate the German term as ‘constitutional requirement of the specific enactment of a statute’ (because secondary legislation is not enough).

It is apparently sometimes translated as ‘legal reservation’ or ‘reservation of law’, which doesn’t convey the meaning at all.

The word Vorbehalt is often a problem. If you translate it as ‘reservation’, you are using a word that’s less usual in legal English than Vorbehalt is in legal German.

I prefer ‘requirement’.

There’s a discussion of the term on LEO (quite useful in parts, but I particularly enjoyed the comment ‘I actually discussed that topic with a common lawyer. He completely ignored that concept’ with its interesting use of ‘ignored’).

I’ve apparently had to translate quite a few words with ‘Vorbehalt’ as part: Änderungsvorbehalt, Beamtenvorbehalt/Funktionsvorbehalt, Eigentumsvorbehalt (reservation/retention of title), Einwilligungsvorbehalt, Erlaubnisvorbehalt, Identitätsvorbehalt, Kontokorrentvorbehalt, Liefervorbehalt, Parlamentsvorbehalt (another term for Gesetzesvorbehalt), Progressionsvorbehalt, and several more.

I can’t quite agree with Rob that this is such a culture-specific term (see Things I learnt from a journo about translating culture-specific terms: (1) Description trumps linguistic solutions), but OK, it is not a concept that applies to UK constitutional law. I would definitely use the definition here, and I might not add the German in brackets.

LATER NOTE: A query on a mailing list relates to Saldohaftungvorbehalt, as in ‘ Eigentumsvorbehalt
Bis zur vollständigen Bezahlungen bleiben alle gelieferten Waren unser Eigentum (Saldohaftungsvorbehalt).’

I would suggest ‘liability for balance’.

One-day symposium on working in legal translation (London)

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The University of Roehampton and JoSTrans are holding a one-day symposium in January on becoming a legal translator.

The former is in Barnes-ish according to Google Maps and calls itself ‘London’s campus university’. The latter I should have a link to already – it’s the Journal of Specialised Translation and its latest edition, the July one, has articles about translating crime fiction which may be of interest to readers of this blog. In fact I attended an excellent seminar run by Karen Seago for the CIoL which did not so much encourage me to translate crime fiction (although there are German crime novels) as to read more of it.

University of Roehampton and JoSTrans present a one-day event on Friday 9th January 2015 at the University of Roehampton, London

Becoming a Legal Translator: a symposium.

Thinking of becoming a legal translator? Already translating legal texts and keen to know more? Perhaps you are teaching on a legal translation course? This day of talks and workshops will feature speakers from a variety of backgrounds and with a wide range of experience in translating and interpreting. Highlights include keynote speeches from Richard Delaney and Juliette Scott, alongside interactive workshops on legal translation and translating for the EU. Please see attached for the full programme.

The symposium will take place in the Gilbert Scott Lecture Theatre, Whitelands College, on Friday 9th January 2015. Please join us for registration in the milling area outside the Gilbert Scott Lecture Theatre at 09:15 for a 09:45 start.

The concession fee for the symposium is £65.00 and the full conference fee is £95.00. To book a place, please visit the University of Roehampton online store by clicking here.

If you have any queries regarding the event, please contact Kristal Oakes (Academic Conferencing Co-ordinator) via email at kristal.oakes@roehampton.ac.uk

We look forward very much to welcoming you to the symposium and to seeing you there!​

Here is a PDF with the programme, as received by me on 24.11.14.
Becoming a Legal Translator 9 Jan 2015 Programme

Unfortunately you can’t register without creating an account, but for future events at Roehampton University you will be laughing.

Loveparade Duisburg: criminal investigation falls into the hands of translators

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There’s an article in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) on the holdups to the Loveparade case resulting from delayed or erroneous translations by two agencies: Das Loveparade-Verfahren überfordert Englisch-Übersetzer.

21 people died from asphyxiation and 541 were injured at the Loveparade 2010 in Duisburg. It seems that the ground was suitable for 250,000 people and didn’t even reach capacity before there was a crush at the entrance between those coming in and those trying to leave. (Wikipedia German, Wikipedia English).

Apparently it is still not clear exactly how the accident occurred. The court commissioned a report from Professor G. Keith Still, Professor of Crowd Science at Manchester Metropolitan University, presumably to throw light on the sequence of events. This choice of expert witness was criticized as all the documents had to be translated into English for Professor Still and his report had to be translated back into German.

Criticism was directed at the delays in translation by the first agency, and also errors in the translation by the second agency. The second agency was commissioned in June 2012. On Friday November 14, Joachim Schwartz, the presiding judge of the 5th Duisburg Strafkammer, sent out three pages of criticism of errors.

What happened in detail in the translations?

1. We don’t know when the first agency was commissioned, just that June 2012 was regarded as too late. The events took place in June 2010, and after that the documents had to be translated and sent to Professor Still and he had to write his report before any translation could be commissioned.

The article states that the public prosecutors were sometimes unsatisfied with the time they had to wait for translations, and that deadlines were repeatedly breached. This suggests that the first agency was responsible for more than one translation – perhaps the DE>EN ones as well as the EN>DE one.

The report is available online as a PDF (21 pages, contains illustrations and photos). However, there was a later extended report, dated March 2013. This second report can be downloaded from the WAZ site here in four parts.

2. On November 14 the court, as stated above, criticized the second agency’s translation. The public prosecutor’s office is waiting to give the agency a chance to respond.

One part criticized is this (from the second report):

When did the loudspeaker system cease to be effective?

Original, referring to loudspeakers: “Their deployment and use is to inform the crowds but once the entry system failed and the crowds flowed in behind the police lines the situation was already beyond the point of no return.”

Translation: “Deren Verwendung und Einsatz dient der Information der Menschenmenge, aber sobald das Eingangssystem versagte, und die Menschenmenge bis zu den Polizeikordonen geströmt war, hatte die Situation einen Punkt überschritten, wo keine Rückkehr mehr möglich war.”

The translation treats “behind the police lines” as “up to the police lines”. I presume this is important because of the allocation of responsibility.

The court also criticized that the translation was in parts dubious, in parts changed the meaning, and in one place had omitted a complete sentence.

There isn’t enough evidence here to demonstrate a really bad translation. On top of that, the report itself is controversial and much criticized by the defence.

There’s a useful German blog on Loveparade 2010:
Dokumentation der Ereignisse der Loveparade 2010 in Duisburg

Unterlassungsgläubiger

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I was wondering what to do with Unterlassungsgläubiger in the case of a declaration of discontinuance. If it had been Unterlassungsschuldner, I could have used declarant, and I was tending here to the other party. But as usual I wondered what others had done.

Someone on Linguee had gone for ‘the party asserting the demand for restraint’, which is correct if nothing else.

There was no ProZ discussion but one on LEO looking for both terms. Someone there suggested respondent and claimant and seemed unfamiliar with German legal terminology:

Da formuliert der Herr Anwalt schon sehr tendenziös. Er stempelt ohne jedes Gerichtsurteil jemanden für alle Zukunft (“zukünftig”) als “Schuldner” ab, obwohl jemand, der etwas unterlassen soll, per definitionem niemandem etwas schuldet. Wahrscheinlich ist die Erklärung gar nicht so lange, dass man die Firmenbezeichnungen immer wieder in Kurzform wiederholen müsste.

Sometimes obligor works for Schuldner, the normal term for a who owes a duty under civil law, but often it isn’t natural English and that depends on the purpose of the text.

There was also a link to a list of terminology on a 2003 translator’s blog:

You might find this link useful:

http://thornton.log.ag/

Scroll down to The section Wettbewerbsrecht Terminolgie I
HTH

Goodness me! that takes me back to CompuServe again – I recognize the technical translator’s name and location. I take the liberty of quoting a whole post from this presumably defunct blog:

Competition Law
Terminology I

In the short time that I have been busying myself with “Disclaimers” and “Cease-and-Desist orders”, I have come across a number of terms that, although I had no difficulty in understanding what they meant (at least well enough for a non-lawyer to get an idea of what it was all about, that is), nevertheless, I really had no idea of the accepted equivalents in British or American English (they are very likely not to be the same).

This is typical of what can happen to a technical translator from time to time. He/she gets the job of translating some boring machine manual, takes a quick look through before accepting but fails to notice that the customer has slipped in a few passages that are well outside his/her own area of expertise and there is nothing to be done about it but try to get help from somebody with an idea on the subject.

It took me well over my self-allotted 30 minutes weblog time today just to put the list together. I estimate that tracking down acceptable equivalents will take at least ten or twenty times as long! I am beginning to get a feeling that for a spare-time blogger, one or two terms per day would be quite enough to track down and document! In normal translation work, of course, while it is usual to make up a terminology list, it is not usual to do it in public! I am going to see what kind of a mess I can make of this. (It is now 2 a.m. again!)

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.