Category Archives: translation

Changes at register office/Änderungen beim Standesamt

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I wrote about the types of German birth certificate in 2005.

The practice of German register offices changed on January 1 2009.

Here is my earlier summary with the changes:

Geburtsschein (minimum details) – now gekürzte Geburtsurkunde
Geburtsurkunde (most details) – now Geburtsurkunde
Abstammungsurkunde (most details – including natural parents) – now beglaubigter Geburtsregisterausdruck

This shows that you can usually translate both Geburtsurkunde and Abstammungsurkunde as birth certificate, but there will be circumstances in which you need to distinguish them and can add ‘showing natural parents’.

Another problem I mentioned then was that some Geburtsurkunden say ‘mit der Abstammungsurkunde identisch’. This means that if you want to get married, you can use the certificate as evidence of your biological parents.

At least the translation is straightforward: we now have a short birth certificate, a (full) birth certificate (to use the UK terms) and a certified extract from the register of births.

There are more changes to the system. There is no longer a Familienbuch, but an Eheregister. I haven’t read these up in detail, but here is some information from Braunschweig.

Webinar on legal translation/Webinar zu juristischer Übersetzung

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eCPD is a company formed this year to provide webinars for translators.

That means an internet seminar for continuous professional development (which the ITI is propagating) that you can follow on your own computer. If you miss the date but have registered, you can hear it online later.

They have a webinar on specializing in legal translation on October 28. The ‘speaker’ (?) is Ricardo Martinez, of the City University of London, who will be giving examples on English and into French and Spanish.

Register here.

This webinar will provide the audience with an overview of the field of legal translation, focusing on the following aspects:
• Why legal translation as a specialisation?
• How to get into the legal translation field
• Disparity between Anglo-American Law / Continental Law
• Types of documents usually translated and some basic vocabulary (examples translated into French and Spanish)
• Main features of legal English
• Some practical problems in legal translation
Practical advice for the budding legal translator.

Speaker: Ricardo Martinez of City University, London
Ricardo has been translating, interpreting and lecturing since 1990, both in the UK and Spain. As an Intérprete Jurado he specialises in the legal and financial fields. He has expanded his areas of expertise throughout the years to other fields such as journalism, TV, tourism, engineering, software localisation and IT. As a lecturer he has taught at the Escuela de Traductores e Intérpretes in Madrid in the 1990s and is currently responsible for the English-Spanish language pair of the Legal Translation MA at City University.
Cost: £15

(This has long since been blogged by Philippa Hammond, but I missed it).

Translation problems in murder trial/Übersetzungsprobleme in Mordverhandlung

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Steve at languagehat takes up an article by Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker (abstract available here, full article only on subscription). The subject is a murder trial requiring written translation of an audiotape in Russian and Bukhori (a dialect of Persian spoken by the Bukharian Jews in Central Asia). It seems that the audiotape was difficult to hear and the translator made a number of errors, although there isn’t enough evidence as to why. The biggest misunderstanding was very favourable to the prosecution – one person to another, travelling in a car, saying ‘Are you getting off?’ but translated as ‘Are you going to make me happy?’ – the verb used is described as odd by commenters to the languagehat entry, and was apparently hard to hear anyway.

I haven’t got the full article, but I find some curious features:

One can imagine the translator’s own happiness when he heard those lines—and Leventhal’s when he read them in the transcript.

Leventhal was the main prosecutor. I don’t know why the translator would be happy.

We go through life mishearing and misseeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

This raises a number of questions. The prosecution should certainly not be playing for high stakes if this means getting a conviction on the basis of one translated sentence – they would have to have a lot more to convince them. Prosecution should not be about convicting people at all costs. And if two people are in a car, then ‘Are you getting off?’ is not exactly a tale told by an idiot that needs to be reconstrued to make sense.

(I’ve read at least three books by Janet Malcolm, all of which were excellent – most recently ‘Two Lives – Gertrude and Alice’, but here I have not enough to go on).

LATER NOTE (and spoiler): I did actually get the whole article. It’s extremely interesting and is mainly a psychological study of what we know of people in court cases. It’s clear there will be an appeal. The problem with the audiotape transcription strongly suggests this was unreliable evidence, but in the context of the whole, it appears just one piece in the mosaic. One has the impression that the trial was unfair to the defendants and to the defence counsel, but nevertheless that the defendant Borukhova may have been correctly convicted.

Translating foreign-language litigation documents/Übersetzung für Gerichtsverhandlungen

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An article by Erik Sherman at law. com, Don’t Let Litigation Get Lost in Translation
Can language conversion software cut cross-border litigation bills?

discusses the problems for a litigation lawyer of dealing with a huge amount of foreign-language material. One has heard tales of US lawyers being presented with truckloads of papers at the discovery stage (Offenlegung).

The conclusions seem to be:

Use machine translation (MT) to get a rough idea of which documents might be worth translating

The article mentions free software and implies that there are other systems. It doesn’t mention the possibility, if you often work with a particular language, of ‘training’ an in-house MT system to translate certain terms in a certain way, to expect legal terminology rather than general terminology and so on. Nor does it mention the problems of optical character recognition (OCR) if the documents are poor faxes. They may even be handwritten. If documents are not in electronic form, you might need to call in a translator to help you sift them. I remember Steve Vitek‘s stories of helping lawyers sort through Japanese patents.

If you need to keep an eye out for keywords, get a translator to identify them in the foreign language, since if they are inconsistently MTd, you may overlook them in English.

Get important documents translated by a human translator

For languages using a different alphabet or writing system, get a translator to identify possible software problems in advance

If you have to use several human translators, use a computer-aided translation system (CAT – translation memory) or at least a glossary to keep them consistent on the main terminology

Don’t let your lawyers change to a foreign language to discuss sensitive issues in the hope that the other side won’t notice what you’re up to

A law firm’s translation department should know a lot of this already. But maybe there are fewer translation departments in the USA.

The article doesn’t go into detail on what law firms need to know, for instance when it obliquely refers to CAT.

Once down to the critical documents, it’s time for human translation. But even here, translation technology plays an important role. Not only can it help jump-start an experienced translator’s efforts, but it can also enforce important uniformity of translation. “A lot of words are subject to multiple interpretations, so what can happen is that you can have two duplicates that have been translated differently, and it can have consequences,” says Constantine Cannon’s Solow. The more translators working on a matter, the greater the chance for variability in translation. Professional translation tools can “learn” specific translation choices and then present them as preferred options to any translator on the team. The translators then feed refined translations back into the tools, increasing the speed of the entire process. And suddenly, you’re ready for court before you can count un, deux, trois.

Sounds great. I incline more to quatre-vingts-dix myself.

I would add to the above: if you have a good translator who knows about software, don’t underestimate their value to you.

This is a weird statement:

The problem of trusting a translation becomes even more critical when dealing with many Asian languages, in which a single character can represent a complex concept. “One of those characters could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of meanings,” says Duncan McCampbell, president of international business consultancy McCampbell Global and a former litigator. “There are characters in Chinese [for example] that have no equivalent in English.”

(Via MA Translation Studies News)

Federal Court of Justice on translators’ fees/Bundesgerichtshof zu Erfolgshonoraren für Übersetzer

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The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) has pronounced judgment in a case relating to a literary translator’s fee. It has sent the case back for retrial, so the decision in this specific case is outstanding, but in principle it supports the plaintiff.

The BGH press release in German is available at the court site and is reprinted in the Börsenblatt. In buchreport there was an article on the background.

The translator in question translated two novels from English into German in 2001 (the German Copyright Act was changed in 2002). She was paid the fifteen euros per page customary in the business at that time. She assigned all her rights of use to the publisher – in Germany, you can’t assign copyright, but you can assign the rights of use of the copyright, which boils down to the same thing here. She therefore did not share in the profits.

The court held that in principle the plaintiff can require the publisher agree to alter her contract. At the time it was entered into, it was customary for fifteen euros per page to be paid. But the intention of the Act was that a translator should have a reasonable share in the profits made on every business use of the translation (presumably this is wider than just print media), for at that time it could not be foreseen that for the period of copyright – until seventy years after the plaintiff’s death – there would be so little profit that fifteen euros a page was a reasonable payment.

International Translator’s Day/Hieronymustag

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(St. Jerome by Rubens, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today is St. Jerome’s Day, which has now apparently become International Translator’s Day, and I am celebrating by translating.

Here are a couple of links, though.

1. Ghaddafi About the story of Ghaddafi’s interpreter collapsing: Richard Schneider has a full account, in German, which suggests that the New York Post was inaccurate when it said the interpreter collapsed after 75 minutes and shouted ‘I can’t take it any more’ – it seems he managed 90 minutes, and the UN interpreter only had to take over the last 5 minutes. The speech was intended to be about 15 minutes long. But simultaneous interpreters usually do about 20 minutes, as far as I know. Ghaddafi said he had brought his own interpreter, because he was going to speak an obscure dialect, but in fact he did not speak dialect. The chairmanship/presidency is currently held by Libya, by rotation, and that is why there was no complaint about the procedural irregularity. (How did Ghaddafi’s French interpreter manage?)

Richard Schneider gibes YouTube links to all sections of the speech. Here is the last one, including the takeover of the interpreting by the UN. These videos may not be accessible online for very long.

2. Becoming a medical translator On her blog, Sarah Dillon has an interview with Andrew Bell, who does medical and pharmaceutical translations and also runs the site Watercooler.

3. White House calls for machine translation Thus Global Watchtower reports.

Last week, the Executive Office of the President and National Economic Council issued its “Strategy for American Innovation.” Among the recommendations was a call for “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world — greatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and collaboration.” In other words, machine translation (MT) has captured somebody’s attention in the President’s inner circle.

This tactic would certainly save all the problems associated with human translators – a potential such was recently held for hours, apparently for having Arabic flashcards in his backpack. (TSA defends itself).