Category Archives: Englishlang

Above all/Über alles

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The Air Force Academy has taken the motto Above All.

“‘Above All’ is about what we do and how we do it,” Colonel Caldwell said. “The job of the Air Force is to defend America and we do that by dominating air, space and cyberspace. The new campaign and slogan captures our roots, but also illustrates where we’re going as a service as the Air Force prepares to contend with future threats.”

I certainly wasn’t aware the U.S. Air Force dominated cyberspace, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

I must say I prefer Per ardua ad astra, but I don’t understand the excitement about a supposed borrowing from Deutschland über Alles. I just can’t see that. The actual use of the word cyberspace looks more foolish to me. See comments to tongodeon’s Live Journal entry, and also the comments at Boing Boing.

Painful back surgery / Tippfehler im Antrag

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We all know that back surgery can be painful, but this got rather worse when it reached the typist’s hands:

Plaintiff moves the court for a continuance of the trial for the reason that counsel for the plaintiff is recovering from dick surgery and because of continuing pain is unable to properly represent the plaintiff in a trial. Counsel is unable to sit for long periods of time.

Scroll down for doctor’s note referring to disk herniation.

(Via Legal Juice)

The Chav Nativity

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The Chav Nativity – picture and text at Charon QC

Then these three geezers turn up, looking proper bling, wiv crowns on their heads. They’re like ‘Respect, bay-bee Jesus’, an’ say they’re wise men from the East End.
Joe goes: ‘If you’re so wise, wotchoo doin’ wiv this Frankenstein an’ myrrh?
Why dincha just bring gold, Adidas and Burberry?’

A Google image search reveals others.

Comparative Legal Linguistics / Buch

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Professor Heikki E.S. Mattila of the University of Lapland has published a book on comparative legal linguistics that looks interesting and expensive. The amazon.com page lets you look inside and see the full table of contents and an extract. The publisher’s page is fairly long too, so I’ll quote from that here:

Contents
Foreword; Foreword to the Finnish original; Part 1 General Introduction: Legal language and legal linguistics; The concept of legal language; Genres of legal language; Legal linguistics as a discipline; The importance of legal-linguistic knowledge; Structure and content of this book. Part 2 Legal Language as a Language for Special Purposes: Functions of Legal Language: Importance of the theory of communication; Achieving justice; Transmission of legal messages; Strengthening the authority of the law; Strengthening lawyers’ team spirit; Linguistic policy; The cultural task of legal language. Part 3 Characteristics of Legal Language: Precision; Information (over)load; Universality and aloofness; Systemic character; Structure and formalism in legal texts; Frequency of initializations and acronyms; Sentence complexity and diversity of language elements; Archaism and solemnity; Proper use of legal language. Legal Terminology: Legal concepts; Characteristics of legal terminology; Formation of legal terminology. The Major Legal Languages: The Heritage of Legal Latin; The importance of Roman law; History of legal Latin; Latin in modern legal languages; The communication value of legal Latin; Dictionaries of legal Latin. Legal German: History of legal German; Characteristics of legal German; International importance of legal German. Legal French: History of legal French; Characteristics of legal French; International position today. Legal English: The common law system; Development of legal English; Characteristics of legal English; Legal English as a global language. Part 4 Conclusion:Lexical comprehension and research needs;changes in legal-linguistic dominance in the international arena; Terminological interaction between legal languages; Problems of lexical comprehension; The need for jurilinguistic research on legal institutions and concepts; Foreign terms and other expressions; Index.

(Via DORES, which has a new set of references out on publications on language and law)

Ken Adams on contract drafting / Verfassen von englischsprachigen Verträgen

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I mentioned Ken Adams’ book ‘A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting’ and an article by him on translating English language contracts in 2004.

Ken has a website which includes a blog and a list of articles with links to them. His latest blog entry introduces a New Law Review article by himself and Alan S. Kaye on the ambiguity of ‘and’ and ‘or’, one of those things that confuses us translators not only when we’re thinking about beziehungsweise.

Note also interesting discussions in the comments on blog entries.

The German Times

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The German Times is the name of a newspaper launched on January 19th in Berlin:

“We want to accompany Europe’s coalescence, in that we are creating a medium from Germany for all of Europe,” says Editor in Chief Bruno Waltert.
Its circulation is 50,000 and it will be distributed to all 7265 members of the parliaments of the EU’s 27 States, as well as national governments, members of the European Parliament, the EU Commission, and Europe’s prominent businessmen.

It has an English-language editor. And an ‘imprint’.