This Hotel Europa shows a picture on its website with the top of the roof cut off. I feel some people who book online may get a surprise when they see it.

1. Tradulinguas conference in Lisbon: There was a legal translation conference in Lisbon recently, which I couldn’t go to. Philippa Hammond has a report with links on her blog, Blogging Translator.

I would have been interested to hear some of the speakers. I see one of them was a Netherlands lawyer-translator called Antoinette Dop, who I once exchanged business cards with in Hammick’s in London.

One of the links leads to a PDF – scroll down here to Ingemar Strandvik – about multilingual drafting in the EU. The PDF must be by Ingemar Strandvik, although it has no name on it, and it refers to a ‘study’, which I presume means the conference paper. One thing that I wonder about the EU is how far the translators are responsible for the legislation – I had always assumed that it was the product of legislators, not necessarily linguists or even lawyers – and I presume that is true of the first drafts, but these are followed by translation into the remaining of the 23 languages.

This is not a co-drafting process in 23 languages as such but a system based on three alternating stages: drafting in the source language, translation into all of the official languages and legal revision of the different language versions with a view to ensuring that each one has equivalent legal value. Translations thus become authentic documents and translators’ responsibility is equal to that of the authors of the source texts.

It would be interesting to hear some details of how the system works in practice – maybe the proceedings of the conference will be published some day.

2. In Sprechen Sie bureaucratisch? (sic), Johnson wonders why the UK issues landing cards in German.

3. law blog reports on a decision of the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) which held that a landlord’s clause requiring the tenant to paint the upper walls and ceilings white (weißen) was ineffective if it was part of general terms of business and restricted the tenant from choosing his own paint colours while living there. Some nice comments:

Mir wurde im Kunstunterricht immer eingebläut, daß Weiß gar keine Farbe ist.

I believe in supporting football teams, but when the local one is at the top of the second Bundesliga, I have the impression more people crawl out of the woodwork:

The team in the festival procession:

And on TV:

From the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors:

Qaddafi, Muammar /Muhammed al-) (b. 1942) Libyan leader – use Qaddāfī in specialist texts; not Gadafi, Gadhdhafi, Qadafy, Gaddafi (although preferred by The Times), Gadaffi

See also As a Linguist … on Wait, who just died?

It’s been all over the news: the death of controversial, feared, despised, admired Libyan leader Mum…Muam…Moamm…

Let’s just say M., shall we? Right then. Libyan leader M. Ghad…Quad…Kadh…Gahd…

Crap. Just how the heck to you spell that guy’s name? According to one article I read many moons ago, there have been a recorded 112 different ways his name has been spelled. And that’s apparently not the only strange thing about him.

See also words to good effect on What’s in a name: spelling “Gaddafi”.

I’ve been “translating” his name (from the Italian version, Gheddafi) just about every day since the Libyan uprising began (I work with another translator on the English version of the Italian Foreign Ministry’s website). So when the rebellion broke out we had to decide quickly on which version to use.

We opted to follow the European Commission’s lead, Italy being a European Union country, and use Gaddafi.

Well, fair enough – but if we all followed EU recommendations, we would have to write ‘-ise’ instead of ‘-ize’. (EU English Style Guide, pdf, 7th ed. June 2011)

The Straight Dope has gone into the topic in great depth too. In reply to an apparently genuine comment from the Library of Congress:

For the record, here’s the official Library of Congress rundown on how to spell ol’ whatsisname: (1) Muammar Qaddafi, (2) Mo’ammar Gadhafi, (3) Muammar Kaddafi, (4) Muammar Qadhafi, (5) Moammar El Kadhafi, (6) Muammar Gadafi, (7) Mu’ammar al-Qadafi, (8) Moamer El Kazzafi, (9) Moamar al-Gaddafi, (10) Mu’ammar Al Qathafi, (11) Muammar Al Qathafi, (12) Mo’ammar el-Gadhafi, (13) Moamar El Kadhafi, (14) Muammar al-Qadhafi, (15) Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, (16) Mu’ammar Qadafi, (17) Moamar Gaddafi, (18) Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, (19) Muammar Khaddafi, (20) Muammar al-Khaddafi, (21) Mu’amar al-Kadafi, (22) Muammar Ghaddafy, (23) Muammar Ghadafi, (24) Muammar Ghaddafi, (25) Muamar Kaddafi, (26) Muammar Quathafi, (27) Muammar Gheddafi, (28) Muamar Al-Kaddafi, (29) Moammar Khadafy, (30) Moammar Qudhafi, (31) Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, (32) Mulazim Awwal Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi.

The Neue Züricher Zeitung also considers the problem, which is just as great in German.

Download here.

May be helpful, for instance, in seeing the sequence of oxcarts (two again) in the harvest festival procession next Sunday.

User’s comment by ivan svrznjak: ‘Passt scho’.

In an earlier entry I mentioned the heavily biased reporting of a Bolivian immigrant to the UK who was said to have been allowed to stay to look after his cat – whereas the acquisition of the cat was just one of several points suggesting that he and his girlfriend planned a long-term relationship.

It seems that Theresa May, the UK home secretary, also believes the tabloid version of this story. The Guardian reports:

The justice secretary told a fringe meeting organised by the Daily Telegraph: “I’ve never had a conversation on the subject with Theresa, so I’d have to find out about these strange cases she is throwing out.

“They are British cases and British judges she is complaining about. I cannot believe anybody has ever had deportation refused on the basis of owning a cat. I’ll have a small bet with her that nobody has ever been refused deportation on the grounds of the ownership of a cat.”

A Home Office source later defended May, saying she had been right. The source quoted the judge in the case, who said: “The evidence concerning the joint acquisition of Maya [the cat] by the appellant and his partner reinforces my conclusion on the strength and quality of the family life that appellant and his partner enjoy.

The UK Human Rights Blog has taken this up.

The decision of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal by Senior Immigration Judge Gleeson (IA/14578/2008), dated 1 December 2008, can be read here. It is only two and a half pages long. Judge Gleeson explained that the reconsideration was granted in reference to

the inappropriate weight placed on the appellant having to leave behind not only his partner but also their joint cat, [ ]

The judge rather cheekily anonymised the cat’s name, which is almost certainly an attempt at humour, given the final line of the judgment:

The Immigration Judge’s determination is upheld and the cat, [ ], need no longer fear having to adapt to Bolivian mice.

Here it appears that the Home Office had failed, until the day of the appeal, to follow guidelines issued earlier that year – and so it would have lost anyway, cat or no cat.

Thereas May has already attracted the attention of human rights lawyers once this week, when she called for the Human Rights Act to be abolished because it had led to decisions against the Home Office. From the same weblog:

The Home Secretary Theresa May’s has told the Sunday Telegraph that she would “like to see the Human Rights Act go“.

There is plenty of nonsense out there about the Human Rights Act. For example Emma McClarkin – a member of the European Parliament no less – said on BBC’s Politics Show (at 5:15) that we are “hamstrung by the European Charter of Human Rights”; a charter which does not exist.