It’s well known that interpreters can’t always translate jokes. But this video clip is a good illustration of how little non-linguists understand the problem.

The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop…and says ‘Can you make me one with everything?’

Needless to say, this did not come across. TV hosts said, ‘You know that a joke’s in trouble if you’ve got a translator off to the side’ (this is understandable) and ‘He should have said “one with the lot”.’ (Pardon?)

The commenters are not impressed:

And yeah, this news guy butchered it. The actual joke is:
“Did you hear about the Zen monk ordering a hot dog? He said ‘Make me one with everything.'”

Adam Liptak in the New York Times:

In a decision last week in a patent case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. puzzled out the meaning of a federal law by consulting the usual legal materials — and five dictionaries.

One of the words he looked up was “of.” He learned that it means pretty much what you think it means.

In May alone, the justices cited dictionaries in eight cases to determine what legislators had meant when they used words like “prevent,” “delay” and “report.” Over the years, justices have looked up both perfectly ordinary words (“now,” “also,” “any,” “if”) and ones you might think they would know better than the next guy (“attorney,” “common law”).

All of this is, lexicographers say, sort of strange.

You’re not kidding. German judges are funny with dictionaries too, especially with the Dietl law dictionary EN>DE. And specialist bilingual dictionaries are always pretty unreliable.

Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the OED, thinks it’s probably wrong in almost all circumstances to use a dictionary in the courtroom. (I suppose editor at large is not the same as criminal at large).

It’s an interesting article and links to other sources, such as a study (183 pages long) in the Marquette Law Review by Kirchmeier and Thumma on the use of dictionaries in the Supreme Court in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Learned Hand, widely considered the greatest judge never to have served on the Supreme Court, cautioned against the mechanical examination of words in isolation.

“It is one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary,” Judge Hand wrote in a 1945 decision, “but to remember that statutes always have some purpose or object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imaginative discovery is the surest guide to their meaning.”

Via Johnson

U.S. Supreme Court justices on legal writing

I saw a brief reference to this recently – it was in the WSJ blog, headed Supreme Court Justices on Writing: Say it Simply.

But after skimming it and reading this, I gave up:

Chief Justice John Roberts prefers the use of “that” over “which,” feeling that the latter term “slows you down.” He says: “That just seems to have a better pace to it.”

Justice Antonin Scalia offers a useful tip for knowing whether your are using silly legalese. “If you used the word at a cocktail party, would people look at you funny? You talk about ‘the instant case’ or ‘the instant problem.’ That’s ridiculous,” Scalia told Garner.

Justice Kennedy doesn’t like briefs that turn nouns into verbs: “I ‘task’ you or I was ‘tasked’ with this assignment.”

Is that all they have to say for themselves, I wondered. I overlooked the 194-page PDF file I now find via Mark Liberman’s post on Language Log, The snoot and the Geechee.

Mark hasn’t had time to read the interviews either, but he quotes an article by Nina Totenberg. The interviews can be heard at LawProse.

ObiterJ blog: Explaining our law and legal system

The ObiterJ blog has published three short entries, and I think will be publishing more, on the English legal system. They are very informative and useful. They are on Legal Personnel, Courts of Law and Tribunals, and The Judges.

At the moment I haven’t found time to continue my own introduction to English law for translators. I was thinking of turning to the courts, which is a very useful topic but somewhat huge, depending on the detail one goes into. A change I was interested in was the tribunal system, which has changed (see the ObiterJ entry). I had missed the fact that I am no longer a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales, but a Solicitor of the Sernior Courts of England and Wales. (Still wondering if the meaning of Supreme Court has now changed, or if there are simply two – the earlier Supreme Court of England and Wales (not the UK) was a collective term for several courts, excluding the House of Lords).

The source of this recommendation was the UK Human Rights Blog, which gives other links and is always a good read.

I took this picture at Rewe yesterday. I didn’t try these ‘sushi’, but I had a look because they seem to be wrapped in rice paper (as it says: ‘Im Reispapier’).

Today I suppose they would have to say ‘No sprouts’.

On Language Log, Bill Poser introduces some links as follows:

Hockey is not a popular sport in the Punjab but it is THE sport in Canada, which now has a large Punjabi population. An interesting example of cultural integration is the fact that CBC Sports now has hockey commentary in Punjabi.

I found this highly bizarre, since some knowledge of Empire indicates that hockey is most certainly popular in the Punjab. But then I realized – as did the two other commenters – that he means ice hockey.

Here are some personalities in Punjab hockey (the real thing).

Born on October 10, 1951, Surjit Singh played for Lyallpur Khalsa College under Guru Nanak Dev University and later for Combined Universities team as deep defender. Surjit Singh made his international debut in the second World Cup Hockey Tournament in Amsterdam in 1973. He was a member of the Indian team which under the leadership of charismatic leader Ajit Pal Singh won the third World Cup Hockey Tournament at Kuala Lumpur in 1975. He also participated in the fifth World Cup Hockey Tournament, the 1974 and 1978 Asian Games, 1976 Montreal Olympic Games Surjit Singh was acclaimed as one of the best full backs in the world. In 1973 he was included in the World Hockey XI. Next year he was a member of the All-Star Hockey XI. Surjit Singh was also the top scorer-both in the Esanda International hockey Tournament at Perth in Australia and the 1978 Asian Games. During his hockey career Surjit Singh was concerned about players cause. Surjit Singh served the Indian Airlines for a few years. Later he joined the Punjab Police.

Not a word about Canada there. Btw, what are they wearing on their heads – is it a symbolic version of a turban designed to play hockey in?

In other sports news, we are used to the phenomenon of important tennis matches only being shown on TV here if a German is playing. The culmination of this is that German news programmes are now obliged to show American basketball, but only because of Dirk Nowitzki. Right now, the Dallas Mavericks are doing very well.

Dirk Werner Nowitzki (German pronunciation: [ˈdɪʁk ˈvɛʁnɐ noˈvɪtski]) (born June 19, 1978) is a German professional basketball player who plays for the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association (NBA). An alumnus of Röntgen Gymnasium and DJK Würzburg basketball club, Nowitzki was drafted ninth overall by the Milwaukee Bucks in the 1998 NBA Draft, and was immediately traded to the Mavericks, where he has played ever since. Standing at 7 ft 0 in (2.13 m), Nowitzki plays the power forward position but also has the mobility, size, and shooting ability to play the other frontcourt positions, center and small forward.

I am merging two topics into one here, as I have no good ideas. I assume the meme was written by a person who prefers film to books, or would rather see books in film form. So many questions on film!

All that occurs to me is: some years ago I missed Chaucer – Canterbury Tales – in Middle English, I believe, on TV. I never succeeded in seeing or finding it. Even better would be Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is much harder to understand (not so much French). We did lots of Chaucer at school and university, and Sir Gawain only at university. I never did any Old English, so have a gap for Beowulf, although I have done some Old Norse (Bandamanna Saga).

The subsidiary English course had just been remodelled when I went to King’s in 1965, and one classmate and I turned up for medieval studies in the English department, where a lecturer had no idea what to do, but then asked us to translate orally the most vulgar part of the Pardoner’s Tale into modern English. This was slightly before the women’s movement took off. But we were well aware that for a male lecturer to ask two new women students to translate vulgarities was offensive. I think I volunteered – in any case, the text was familiar – maybe he thought it wasn’t. At all events, the old man wandering the earth and wanting to die, being mocked by young men (recalling current beatings in tube stations), would have been the obvious choice of text, not this:

“Nay, nay,” quod he, “thanne have I Cristes curs!
Lat be,” quod he, “it shal nat be, so theech,
Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
Though it were with thy fundement depeint.
But by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord.”

So much for women and university.

Anyway, that doesn’t answer these two questions except to suggest that another film of Chaucer might be made.

As for films one regrets, I recently watched Andrew Davies’ Doctor Zhivago, and although the cast seemed promising, it lacked the drive and of course the music of the David Lean version. It was difficult to see why Zhivago would prefer Keira Knightley to Alexandra Maria Lara (not to knock Geraldine Chaplin, but the contrast was better there while leaving both women characters uncriticized). I still haven’t read the novel, so can’t comment on the omission of the Rita Tushingham and Alec Guinness characters (the daughter and the Communist half-brother).

Actually, there are a lot of sites on the internet where people answer these two questions. Clicking around, I remembered that Smilla’s Sense of Snow was a dreadful film if you had read the book. I’ve forgotten most of the details now, but I think for a start the main character was not supposed to be attractive in any conventional sense.