IT in Supreme Court

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In the Times Online, Richard Susskind describes the IT systems used or to be used in future in the new Supreme Court. So the new building has done some good!

Fixed cameras are installed (banned in other courts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland).

Documents discussed to be shown on screens.

The three courts are also equipped with document display systems. Elegant, black, flat, high-resolution monitors sit before all judges. When barristers argue their cases, the precise pages under discussion appear on the screens. The judges do not need to search for paper-based folders and documents. This technology alone can cut hearing times by a quarter.

Justices can use laptops and mark up documents on them.

Unless permission is given, everything must be filed both on paper and electronically.

Information for public online:

What about the public and the lawyers? Any web user can find out the status of cases before the court. Details are fed from the case management system to the website (www.supremecourt.gov.uk), so people can view summary information and lawyers peruse in greater detail.

Hope it all works!

(Tweeted by Nick Holmes)

Refresher/Sonderhonorar für Barrister

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The Oxford English Dictionary has a word-of-the-day service. Today’s word is refresher, and one meaning is the one that sprang to mind immediately:

Dietl-Lorenz:
refresher Sonderhonorar für den Anwalt (Br barrister) (bei längerer Verhandlungsdauer)

Romain
refresher außerordentliche Anwaltsgebühr (bei langandauerndem Prozess bzw. mehrtägiger Verhandlung)

OED:

2. Law.

a. An extra fee paid to counsel when a case lasts longer than originally expected or allowed for.
1796 Attorney & Agent’s New Table of Costs (ed. 5) 222 Refresher to Mr. Bearcroft. 1831 F. REYNOLDS Playwright’s Adventures vi. 108 He also knew that barristers..can only be kept alive by refreshers. 1881 Times 19 Feb. 10/3 It is therefore recommended that daily refreshers should be abolished, as being one of the principal causes of the undue lengthening of trials. 1933 H. ALLEN Anthony Adverse xlix. 740 My retainer is reasonable, my refreshers modest, my reputation unblemished. 1991 Investors Chron. 26 July 68/3 The refreshers or daily fees will never be less than £1,000.

{dag}b. A revised brief. Obs. rare.
1852 T. DE QUINCEY Sketch from Childhood in Hogg’s Instructor 8 2/1 Every fortnight, or so, I took care that he should rec

eive a ‘refresher’, as lawyers call it{em}a new and revised brief{em}memorialising my pretensions.

Guido Westerwelle

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It was widely reported and tweeted yesterday that Guido Westerwelle, the FDP (Liberal) party leader who will be Germany’s next foreign minister, refused to speak English when requested to do so (28th September).
Es ist Deutschland hier

The BBC correspondent asks Westerwelle to speak English, and Westerwelle says that as this is a German press conference in Germany, he can take questions in English but he will answer them in German.

This seems perfectly OK to me, but a lot of other Germans have been making fun of him for this. I admit he gets tactless after answering, when he says in German ‘We can meet outside the conference for tea and speak English, but it’s Germany here’. I hope his manners improve as foreign nminister.

Now Cem Özdemir of the Green Party has made a video Cem Özdemir asks BBC to stay with us promising German speakers of English will be back after the next elections in four years’ time.

I really can’t see that this video does the Greens any good either.

LATER NOTE: The Independent has an article by Philip Hensher, Flummoxed by foreign tongues, supporting Westerwelle too, and mentioning the decline of foreign language teaching and university courses in the UK:

Some people, even in Germany, have criticised Westerwelle for his insistence, and suggested that in fact he couldn’t answer in English. Actually, though his English is certainly not as horribly wonderful as many German politicians’, and he does seem to make some trivial mistakes, it is perfectly serviceable. More curiously, what did the BBC think it was doing, sending a reporter to a press conference in Germany on the German elections, knowing that he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak any German?

See also blog entry by Gabi (in German)

International Translator’s Day/Hieronymustag

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(St. Jerome by Rubens, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today is St. Jerome’s Day, which has now apparently become International Translator’s Day, and I am celebrating by translating.

Here are a couple of links, though.

1. Ghaddafi About the story of Ghaddafi’s interpreter collapsing: Richard Schneider has a full account, in German, which suggests that the New York Post was inaccurate when it said the interpreter collapsed after 75 minutes and shouted ‘I can’t take it any more’ – it seems he managed 90 minutes, and the UN interpreter only had to take over the last 5 minutes. The speech was intended to be about 15 minutes long. But simultaneous interpreters usually do about 20 minutes, as far as I know. Ghaddafi said he had brought his own interpreter, because he was going to speak an obscure dialect, but in fact he did not speak dialect. The chairmanship/presidency is currently held by Libya, by rotation, and that is why there was no complaint about the procedural irregularity. (How did Ghaddafi’s French interpreter manage?)

Richard Schneider gibes YouTube links to all sections of the speech. Here is the last one, including the takeover of the interpreting by the UN. These videos may not be accessible online for very long.

2. Becoming a medical translator On her blog, Sarah Dillon has an interview with Andrew Bell, who does medical and pharmaceutical translations and also runs the site Watercooler.

3. White House calls for machine translation Thus Global Watchtower reports.

Last week, the Executive Office of the President and National Economic Council issued its “Strategy for American Innovation.” Among the recommendations was a call for “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world — greatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and collaboration.” In other words, machine translation (MT) has captured somebody’s attention in the President’s inner circle.

This tactic would certainly save all the problems associated with human translators – a potential such was recently held for hours, apparently for having Arabic flashcards in his backpack. (TSA defends itself).

German cat case/Deutscher Katzenfall in Times

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Gary Slapper reports on two weird cases in The Times. One of them is a case recently decided by the Frankfurt am Main administrative court (Verwaltungsgericht).

The story begins with Peter Neumann’s cat and its expensive food tastes. The cat, Neumann argued, ate a €500 banknote. Holding some fragments of the note which he said had gone through the cat and been discovered in the litter tray, Neumann then went to the German Bundesbank to ask for a replacement note. … The bank declined to replace the note in this case.

The original German case report is here.

Soweit der Kläger geltend machen will, dass die drei von ihm eingereichten Banknotenteile zusammen mehr als 50 % einer 500,00 Euro-Banknote ergeben, hat das überzeugende Sachverständigengutachten ergeben, dass das Teilstück 2 nicht von der gleichen Banknote stammen kann wie die Teilstücke 1 und 3, sondern dass es sich mindestens um 2, evtl. sogar um 3 Ausgangsbanknoten handeln muss, von denen die fraglichen Teilstücke stammen. Aber auch die Teilstücke 1 und 3, die von derselben Originalnote stammen, ergeben – wie sich aus dem Sachverständigengutachten ergibt – keinen Flächenanteil von mindestens 50 % einer Banknote.

…
Wie die Beklagte zu Recht ausgeführt hat, ist es durchaus denkbar, dass die Katze – nachdem sie die Banknote zerfetzt hat – Teile der Banknote unbemerkt verschleppt hat und die Banknotenteile später aufgefunden werden oder aber wenn sie die Banknote tatsächlich gefressen hat – die Banknotenteile ausgeschieden hat und die Banknotenteile in den Exkrementen der Katze noch vorhanden waren und je nach Verbleib der Exkremente in diesen noch vorgefunden werden konnten bzw. können. Insoweit wäre es dem Kläger zuzumuten gewesen, die übrigen Banknotenteile in den Exkrementen der Katze sicherzustellen.

The name of the plaintiff is correctly not revealed in the German accounts.

Slapper seems to think the most curious other cat to have challenged the courts was Blackie the Talking Cat in Augusta, Georgia. He may not have heard of the other German case where a man received a fax in the night and jumped out of bed so fast that he frightened his cat, which fell off the scratching post and injured itself. Damages were not awarded.

Die zulässige Klage ist unbegründet, da dem Kläger keine Schadensersatzansprüche bezüglich der Verletzung seiner Katze zustehen. Als alleinige Anspruchsgrundlage kommt vorliegend § 823 BGB in Betracht. Der Kläger macht geltend, daß durch das zur Nachtzeit eingehende Faxschreiben der Beklagten sein Telefon geläutet habe, er aus dem Schlaf geschreckt und zum Telefon geeilt sei, wodurch die Katze vor Schreck vom Kratzbaum sprang und sich hierdurch verletzte.

David Hawkes obituary/Nachrufe

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I’ve read The Story of the Stone (the Dream of the Red Chamber) twice this year but I didn’t realize that David Hawkes, who translated the first three volumes, died on 31 July (the last two volumes were translated by John Minford, his son-on-law).

There’s an article in today’s Guardian by Fu Ying, the Chinese ambassador to the UK, Remembering David Hawkes. Guardian obituary by John Gittings, Times obituary

Hawkes apparently gave up his chair of Chinese Studies at Oxford to translate full-time.

The translation is a very good read, witty as well as erudite. I love the translations of the names of all the servants and other characters (Baoyu’s servant Ming Yan (Tea Mist) is Tealeaf – although he isn’t a thief, he is resourceful and cunning – the Buddhist nun is Mother Euergesia, and I recall a passing reference to members of the Chinese upper class including ‘Piggy Feng’, which could have come from Evelyn Waugh)

Apart from reading, I’ve also been watching the 1987 TV version on 12 DVDs; a 2009 version is being made. I wouldn’t recommend watching this in reliance on the English subtitles unless you’ve read the novel first: this is some of the worst English I’ve ever seen, and some of the subtitles go past so fast you can scarcely see them, let alone read them, but I assume the film gives a good impression of what the garden may have looked like, the big funeral processions, the arrangements for eating, the plays (operas) and so on. See the chapter titles here for an idea of the English in the subtitles.

Redology (with one d, Guardian) is the study of the Dream of the Red Chamber. One of Fu Ying’s criticisms of the translation is that Hawkes decided not to use the colour red throughout as it is used in the Chinese.

There were, of course, points at which Hawkes was less successful. His reluctance to use the word “red” drew criticism, for “red” is central to the message of the book, referring as it does in Chinese culture to all the good things in life: youth, love, prosperity, and nobility. He avoided ‘red’ in the title of the book which he translated into The Story of the Stone, rather than Dream of Red Mansions. He also translated the hero’s residence as House of Green Delight, instead of Happy Red Court as its Chinese name literally suggests.

Hawkes discusses these decisions in notes and forewords.

Next on my reading list in Dore J. Levy’s Ideal and Actual in the Story of the Stone, which can easily be got second-hand.