On Antitransblawg I started by saying: don’t translate Rechtsanwalt as solicitor.

Comments and questions are welcome in tweets.

There won’t always be explanations here.

But:

1. In England and Wales, the legal profession is divided into solicitors and barristers (‘the divided profession’).
In Germany, there is no such division. Rechtsanwalt is therefore a broader term. As I say under 4. below, it can be good to take a broader term (e.g. lawyer) – but it is a bad idea to take a narrower term (solicitor, barrister).

2. In the EU, a solicitor may practise as a solicitor in Germany, and a Rechtsanwalt may practise as a Rechtsanwalt in the UK.
So there are cases where you don’t want to translate the term at all, but just use the German.
Otherwise it may be confusing.

David Hole in Munich did the transfer test, so he can call himself both a solicitor and a Rechtsanwalt.

3. Lots of translators who live in the UK and work for UK clients use the term solicitor as a translation, and so do lots of British people (‘My sister is getting divorced in Germany, and her solicitor says…’). Well, this may well work in general waffly contexts.

Here’s a discussion on ProZ. In the text there, there was a reference to a notary who was also a Rechtsanwalt (this is the case in some Länder) so lawyer was not a good term to distinguish Notar and Rechtsanwalt.

4. Other terms are lawyer (a very broad term, but certainly OK – and in legal terminology it’s often useful to go to a broader term for a solution) and attorney (which I like, although some think it is too unfamiliar in the UK – but historically it was used. I don’t particularly like adding ‘at law’, although I suppose it will increase your earnings if you are paid by the target line/word.

Antitransblawg on Twitter: how not to translate from German to English, mainly legal vocabulary.

Tweets should appear in the right-hand margin (still working on that).

Every few years I get a text with an environmental element and I have read so many people using the non-existent English word immissions that I begin to wonder if I am going mad.

German has this nice contrasting pair, Emissionen and Immissionen, for pollution emitted and pollution received. I gather that the big problem began when some years ago the Bundesimmissionsschutzgesetz was translated as the Federal Immission Control Act. At all events, according to a colleague of mine who may or may not wish to remain nameless, a translator tried to deal with the problem by introducing the word immission into English, but the meaning never followed.

Actually, some websites use the title Federal Emission Control Act, which is interesting (I discovered this by entering a typo). I have a suggestion to translate it as impact, but I still don’t think it captures the German dichotomy, and of course I don’t have to translate it that often so I have never had to distinguish the two. (Volkswagen: Federal Emissions Protection Act, European Environment Agency, Federal Emission Control Act).

I have it on excellent authority that native speakers of English who talk about emissions from power plants never ever use the word immission.

This evening, scenes of extraordinary jubilation on the streets of Fürth ostensibly marked the football team’s ascent to the first division. But readers know they were really celebrating Transblawg’s ninth birthday (I forgot about the eighth in 2011). The song was ‘Nie mehr zweite Liga’.

Quick reaction from a lotto shop in the Schwabacher Straße:

(I see Sinosplice is exactly one year older, but has curious ideas about what day the week begins on).

Newspaper article and pictures here.

Here’s a photo showing the story on the front of the local paper. But the really good photo of this scene is inside the paper – see the article Noch ist es dem Spargel zu kalt. I wish I’d been there to take that second photo, showing an asparagus photoshoot with numerous walk-on parts in very cold weather, but as I wasn’t, I’m not allowed to publish it direct.

Instead, here is an offer for a reduced-price asparagus plate and matching tongs, so you can pick it up carefully.

I won’t be needing one of these myself. Unfortunately, as reported here every year, we will be hearing little except effusions about asparagus here for the next several weeks.

On China Law Blog, in a post titled The Legal Faults With Faulty China Translations, Dan Harris suggests you need a good legal translator to do business in China, preferably ‘a truly bilingual attorney who works just for you’:

My favorite (which I have seen at least a half a dozen times) is to do an English language contract that says “A” and a Chinese language contract that says “not A.” The Chinese language contract then makes clear that in any dispute it will prevail. The American party thinks it just signed a contract that says “A” but in reality it just signed a contract that says “not A.” We have twice dealt with situations where a company came to us believing that its joint venture agreement required the joint venture to use the American company as the exclusive US distributor of the Joint Venture’s products, but the contract actually made the US company the exclusive distributor of the Chinese joint venture partner’s product. The problem in both cases was that the Chinese company joint venture partner had never and was not making the product for which the US company believed that it had become the exclusive distributor. Then there are the countless times a word like “must” is changed to “may.”

I wonder whether these contracts provide that the Chinese language and Chinese law govern. Sounds like it. When I translate contracts they’re in German and the German language and German law govern, and my translation into English is just a gloss. I believe one of the biggest German law firms used a watermark on their translations into English saying ‘For information only’ – and those were practising (and therefore insured) lawyers involved. Whatever is going on here involves legal work, as far as I can see. In my situation, if I happened to translate the opposite to what the contract said, firstly the client normally checks in, but in the last instance the German prevails. From my regular reading of China Law Blog (I get the RSS feed), things are not so rosy in China.