I just received an exclusive offer from ProZ.com:

Exclusive offer on Whitesmoke grammer and writting software for ProZ.com users

At least Whitesmoke themselves seem to spell OK. Mind you, they are actually WhiteSmoke, I see.

Is there a term for not remembering which internal letters are capitalized in words like this (PrOz, WhitEsmoke, WorDpeRfect)?

When the Directorate-General for Translation made the translation memory of the acquis communautaire available, I didn’t download it because I was about to move to another computer. Meanwhile, I haven’t needed the material. But now it appears that sites like www.linguee.de incorporate this material among others. It’s natural to do this, and it is quicker to search online than on one’s own computer, probably.

I did enquire on Twitter what other sites do this, but I didn’t get an answer. Now I have found a list of several sites on Fabio Said’s weblog (Portuguese). One that looks particularly interesting is OPUS, an open source parallel corpus.

When Germans buy a mincer (US meat grinder, DE Fleischwolf), they are anxious to ensure that it has an attachment for making piped biscuits (DE Spritzgebäck).

Wikipedia EN Spritzgebäck

Continuing from yesterday: article in MDÜ:
Stefan Bonath: Herausforderung Rechtstexte.

There’s a brief summary of this in English and French in the MDÜ (print copies of each issue can be ordered for 15 euros)

Stefan Bonath did the first part of German law studies, then changed to translation at the Fachhochschule in Cologne – as far as I know, this is the highest-level institution in Germany offering a reasonable study of legal translation, for unless things have changed a lot, the universities that teach translation just dip a toe in the subject. He has worked as an in-house legal translator for a law firm and for a translation agency, but mainly freelance.

This is a sound basic introduction to the problems of legal translation. For example, it explains the particular problem that each legal term is embedded in a system, so it carries a lot more baggage with it than some people realize. Bonath finds it particularly problematic than many legal terms are also terms of the general language – for example ownership and possession. He emphasizes the importanbce of comparative law and suggests it might be a good idea for legal translators to specialize more narrowly ‘sodass sich sein Rechercheaufwand mit wachsender Erfahrung verringert und die Arbeit wirtschaftlich rechnet’ (perhaps I would say: to improve the quality of the translator’s work).

The article also quotes its sources (something I missed in the second article). I haven’t read Arntz, Fachbezogene Mehrsprachigkeit in Recht und Technik (I only have his co-authored book on terminology), but Sandrini on legal translation in Übersetzen von Rechtstexten. Fachkommunikation im Spannungsfeld zwischen Rechtsordnung und Sprache, and Gérard-René de Groot on translating legal terminology in Recht und Übersetzen are both familiar. I see on looking at them again that both point out that legal terminology work cannot be done in the same way as that for other subjects (a topic I need to come back to). I can’t accept the standard recommendation of Black’s Law Dictionary as the English-language equivalent of Creifelds, Rechtswörterbuch: there is none.

One thing I found a bit odd in the article may have resulted from the lack of a concrete example. Bonath writes that it might be wrong to translate owner as Eigentümer, because in English and US law, an owner could even have acquired the property by theft.

So triff die Eigenschaft eines owner im angloamerikanischen Recht auf eine Person zu, die infolge Kauf, Schenkung oder Herstellung usw., aber auch durch Besitzergreifung oder Diebstahl das Eigentum an einer Sache oder sogar an einem Recht erlangt.

But if the English text says that someone is an owner, I would want to write Eigentümer in German, since the text is not about German law. It would be twisting the meaning of law to change it to Besitzer. However, I suspect Bonath was thinking of a different situation when he wrote this.

I see that Dieter Henrich, in Einführung in das englische Privatrecht, writes

Eine etwas merkwürdige Regelung enthielt Sec. 24 (1) Sale of Goods Act 1891: Auch an gestohlenen Waren kann gutgläubig Eigentum erworben werden (nämlich bei einem Erwerb in market overt).

This is the old edition of Henrich – the newer one is hiding – and I know that market overt has been removed from the law now, following a rather amusing case a few years ago. (This isn’t relevant to the general point under discussion). Anyway, Henrich has to use the term Eigentum here.

The other question that occurs to me, which is not intended as a criticism, is: who is going to read this article? Presumably to students of translation – although, as I said, the most academic of those are not likely to be studying legal translation, at least not in any depth. Legal translators are going to be aware of the points made. The article provides information about legal translation perhaps to those thinking about a future career, and to non-legal translators.

LATER NOTE: The comments attached to this post seem to belong to a post about Lena at Eurovision. Something must have gone wrong in the import from Serendipity. What is the opposite of serendipity?

As Usain Bolt wins in Berlin, ‘the fastest man planet Earth has seen‘, we recall Jesse Owens’ triumphs in 1936.

It was before my time, but I’ve grown up with Jesse Owens being referred to regularly in conversation.

Wikipedia (inter alia) reports that Owens was not insulted by Hitler. Hitler was privately annoyed that he was doing so well, but he was not rude to him in public. Owens got no acknowledgement from the US President, however
.

He also stated: [12] “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.” Jesse Owens was never invited to the White House nor bestowed any honors by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) or Harry S. Truman during their terms. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acknowledged Owens’ accomplishments, naming him an “Ambassador of Sports.”

…
Despite Hitler’s feelings, Owens was cheered enthusiastically by 110,000 people in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and later ordinary Germans sought his autograph when they saw him in the streets. Owens was allowed to travel with and stay in the same hotels as whites, an irony at the time given that blacks in the United States were denied equal rights. After a New York ticker-tape parade in his honor, Owens had to ride the freight elevator to attend his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.[7]

Hitler apparently told Speer that those whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive and had a better physique, and they ought to be excluded from future games.