William Wilson, as reported here before, was the British driver of the first train that travelled between Fürth and Nuremberg. There isn’t much about him in the internet in English, but a Wikipedia article in German, and more in the franken-wiki. One learns that he didn’t speak a word of German when he came, but he spent the rest of his life in Germany. His health was affected by standing at the front of the train in a frock coat and top hat in wind and weather.

The franken-wiki reports on letters from the consul in Cologne, where Wilson first arrived in Germany, to the Ludwigs-Eisenbahn railway company:

„Gleich nach dem Abgang unseres Briefes zur Post erschien Wilson, ein Stück Beefsteak. Wir mussten einen Dolmetscher nehmen, um uns mit ihm zu verständigen.“ und: „Der Engländer sitzt hier und verzehrt gutes Geld – er sagte mir schon gestern, dass ihm Herr Stephenson nur sparsam mitgegeben habe, er von mir also Geld und Beförderung erwartet.“

(Wilson is described as ‘a piece of beefsteak’ – ‘We had to use an interpreter to talk to him’ – and spending good money because Stephenson gave him so little for the journey).

Today the Nürnberger Zeitung reports at length on Wilson, who died 150 years ago (on 17 April 1862).

Curiously, Wilson, who was born in Walbottle, now a suburb of Newcastle on Tyne, has become a Scot in the article, and Walbottle been transplanted to the Highlands. Having called him ‘ein worthy gentleman from England’, the article immediately ‘corrects’ itself and says that ‘on the British islands’ people take such things as whether one is English or Scottish very seriously. He is referred to as ‘a Scot who can stand up to the Highland winds’ and my favourite:

Am 18. Mai 1809 in Walbottle geboren, versuchte Wilson sein Glück jedoch nicht in den heimischen Hochlanden, sondern beim Nachbarn in den tieferen Gegenden: er lernte beim Eisenbahnpionier George Stephenson im englischen Newcastle und brachte es dort zum Maschineningenieur und Lokführer.

(Born on 18 May 1809 in Walbottle, Wilson tried his luck not in his native Highlands, but in the lower regions of the neighbour(ing country): he trained under George Stephenson, the railway pioneer, in Newcastle in England and became a mechanical engineer and train driver).

The Highlands of Walbottle in Google Maps.

The article is quite detailed in other respects, about how Wilson accompanied the train and supervised the reconstruction – students made sketches of all the parts first (why does this remind me of Germany selling high-speed trains to China?), how popular he was with passengers and how much he earned in Nuremberg.

LATER NOTE: A day later, the text has been changed. Must stop commenting on local paper websites. Why should I mind if the population of Nuremberg can’t tell the difference between Mao and Zhou?

Happy Easter to any readers, with a picture of some German cars and phallic structures in central Nuremberg last week.

And here is the window of Confiserie Neef:

and part of the counter of the Russian cake shop Konditorei Reimer in Fürth:

Note small video (in Russian) on the Reimer site.

I know the word preclusion exists in English, and it may be slightly more common in the USA than in the UK. But I always feel worried when I see it and wonder what peculiar technical details may apply to it. It reminds me of German lawyers teaching German law and spending a good half hour on terms like hemmen and unterbrechen (different ways of interrupting a limitation period), when you’re more confused at the end than you were before.

In the same connection, I got the term Einwendungsausschluss, for which you might say Einwendungspräklusion. It refers to the deadline for objections to administrative acts. I found it translated on the Web as preclusion from objection. That just doesn’t work for me – it’s obviously an attempt to create a neat term, but the preposition sounds odd, and preclusion is something I have to look up.

Präklusion to me is time bar
präkludieren to bar
Einwendungsausschluss cut-off period for objections

Another term is statute bar, but in my recent translation there was no statute, just delegated legislation.

All I can find in Black’s (8th ed.) is

preclusion order: An order barring a litigant from presenting or opposing certain claims or defenses for failing to comply with a discovery order.

And Garner’s book on legal English says preclusory is a needless variant of preclusive. Gifis (Barron’s) has preclusion of issue, which is something else too (‘the rendering of a decision that precludes the issue decided from being relitigated’).

If anyone who writes legal English disagrees, let them say so!

The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law has finally appeared. (That is a link to OUP, where you can also see some of the material).

You can see the table of contents and more at Peter Tiersma’s website – which I recommend in general if you don’t already know it.

I was particularly interested in the articles on translation, but now I look at the titles, I see that most of them deal with jurisdictions with one legal system and more than one language. I don’t know about Susan Sarkevic, I just know that her book (New Approach to Legal Translation) had a lot of stuff on that kind of ‘translation’ of legislation. This is the – outdated – list on Peter Tiersma’s site:

III. Multilingualism and Translation

Michel Bastarache, The Interpretation of Bilingual Statutes
Jan Engberg, Word Meaning and the Globalized Legal Order
Susan Sarcevic, Challenges to the Legal Translator
Karen McAuliffe, Translating Laws in the EU
(Maria Teresa Turrel and Teresa Castiñeira, Issues Facing a Multilingual Legal System)

The last item has been replaced by an article on Fifty Years of Multilingual Interpretation in the European Union by Cornelius J.W. Baaij.

What I’m interested in is translation from one language and jurisdiction, especially civil law, to another language with a different jurisdiction, especially common law. I have never understood the various language versions of EU statutes to be translations, even if in some sense translation is involved.

Still, I would be interested to see what they say.

The book is very expensive but there is actually a Kindle version and you can get it from amazon.de. I find that quite rare with law books – usually if they appear in the UK or USA, I can’t get them electronically.

Via Katy Derbyshire in love German books, a sad tale of how an Israeli translator of Harry Potter didn’t even get a ticket to the press screening of the film, let alone recognition of the translation, which was used in the subtitles.

The whole sad story is told by Gili Bar-Hillel, who writes a blog usually in Hebrew, but in this case an English post:

Though I was not employed by Warner Bros. and not contractually obligated towards them, such was the power of this company that they were able to threaten me by proxy. As far as I was able to figure out, Warner Bros. bullied the Christopher Little Agency into bullying the various international publishers to bully their translators into retroactively waiving all rights to their translations, under the threat that otherwise the publishers would not be sold translation rights to future books in the series. This is how it happened to me: I was invited to a chat with the Israeli publisher after I had already translated the first three books in a series. He met me in a café and required me to sign a memo, which I was not allowed to read in advance or show to anyone else, and of which I was not allowed to retain a copy. I was told I must sign on the spot or the job of translating future Harry Potter books would be given to another translator. As far as I was able to understand, the memo was a promise to Warner Bros. that I would not claim trademark on any of the translated terms I had invented. I could sign or be cut off from Harry Potter forever. I signed.

It later became apparent that to Warner Bros. this memo was tantamount to a complete waiver of any and all intellectual rights I may have thought to lay claim to. When the Harry Potter films were distributed in Israel, my translation served as the basis for the subtitles and dubbing scripts of the film, without my permission or that of the Israeli publisher. I never received any compensation for this. I was never thanked or credited. In fact, the translator who was responsible for the Hebrew titles complained that her contract from Warner Bros. obliged her to use my translation.

Read the whole thing.

In comparison, Sharon Neeman had it easy – when I think of translators in Israel, I remember her song on YouTube, 5,000 words, all translated for lawyers, of course (and let me repeat that a normal day’s work is nearer 2,000 words).

5000 Words (video)

Apparently there is a CD too – order5000words@gmail.com for details (at least, this was the story in February 2009).

This was a great seminar on legal English and contract law given by Stuart Bugg, who is a NZ and English lawyer (he was born in Yorkshire, which I didn’t know) and run by the Regensburg section of the BDÜ. It was on March 24th and lasted all day.

Actually I have stopped writing up seminars, because it can be invidious: one finishes up either being unintentionally nasty or stealing all their good material. So I will be brief. Everything about this seminar was excellent, especially the good materials and the relaxed atmosphere which allowed us to have a good discussion on a number of points while at the same time snaffling about 100 pages of good stuff. Probably seminar leaders know that we translators never find time to read them afterwards. The organization was also very good – coffee and lunch breaks on time and ran very smoothly.

Here are some pictures of the venue (Thon-Dittmer Palais) and the place for lunch:

Stuart Bugg is one of the authors of the Langenscheidt-ALPMANN Fachwörterbuch Kompakt Recht, which has come out in a second edition since I referred to it. He has also published Contracts in English – an introductory guide to understanding, using and developing “Anglo-American” style contracts. I had a look at this in advance and was impressed. You can see the table of contents at the link above. Stuart specializes in contracts and contract law and refers to all common-law jurisdictions. My only criticism of the book so far is that over one-third of it consists of texts like the Law Reform (Frustrated Contracts) Act 1943 which can be found on the internet. The reason for this, as I have mentioned before, is that the book is partly directed at lawyers, and German lawyers are often kept on a short leash as far as using the internet and CD-ROMs is concerned, so they like to have stuff in books. Stuart confirmed this and said the software can mess up the internal IT systems.

Now I don’t want to go into any detail, and indeed, I’ve got to find time to process all my notes and the materials while it’s fresh in my mind. But some notes, partly on things I need to think about:

1. Stuart said that when he translates a German contract into English, English lawyers tend to think it’s wrong. Exactly! If an English lawyer thinks your translation sounds like an English contract, something is amiss. We also discuss liability. I don’t translate a contract unless it says the language and law governing it are German – because if I were to convert a German text into a common-law one, I would be acting as a lawyer, and I am neither registered nor insured for that. Stuart said that there is a third clause: the jurisdiction should be Germany too, since otherwise you might land up in the Saudia Arabia courts, albeit with German law as the basis.

2. Must give more thought to the terminology of ending contracts, which has been pursuing me for a few decades now. We talked about rescission and also about cancellation (avoid the latter term).

3. Gewährleistung (a term I think the BGB has done away with), Garantie, warranty, Bürgschaft: another can of worms.

4. Must investigate what deeds are in the USA. I thought specialty contracts were only valid in England and that deeds in the USA were just smoke and mirrors for clients, but apparently I was wrong and you do need a deed in the USA to convey land. I may come back to this.

5. Got a bit tied up on how to translate §. Because of course, it’s one thing translating § in a statute, but another in a contract. I tend to leave the §, which is probably stupid, since it confuses some British people (but what doesn’t?). It comes up both in a heading and when referred to later (clause?)

6. Differences between damages (only monetary) and Schadensersatz. (I was a bit surprised to see a recent online translation of the Zivilprozessordnung using damages to mean Schäden).

7. Translating Vertragsstrafe – not as liquidated damages, because that would imply the complete sum.

8. Apparently Germans confuse arbitrary and arbitral, haha!

9. Many had no idea what bailment is. Of course, easily confused with bail and bailiff.

10. We discussed shall and will and must a lot. Agree that will and shall are both binding in contracts. Sure enough, I almost immediately got a contract a client had altered, using will in the added bits where I had used shall in the rest. Not a big problem, but I decided it would be safer to stick to one throughout.

And here is a contemporary pillar at Regensburg Station (one of several):