Swiss Tony, at Will I be Barred?, ponders the Bar Vocational Course while doing a pre-course test:

I started on Contract Law. I enjoyed that. I got good marks for it. I understood it all. So the first 10 questions. Offer and Acceptance. The Postal Rule. Easy peasy. I can do that standing on my head. offers, counter offers, silence, auctions, telex machines, Butler Machine Tool, Boots Pharmacutical, Hyde v Wrench, bring them on, I can do them in my sleep.

I got 3/10. ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I am now too scared to try then next 10. I only have another 2490 questions to do and I am like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

Worst thing about it, I used my text books and still got 3/10!!!

If I thought I was worried before, I am in desperate need of a brain transplant.

I hope he’s not serious about Julie Andrews.

Sarah Dillon, of There’s Something about Translation, like me, reads a lot of blogs in a feed reader. She posts a list of 85 translator-related blogs.

One might add fucked translation, which reports on bad translations, with the subtitle ‘What happens when Spanish institutions give translation contracts to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London and only charges 0.05€/word’.

Following my discovery of insoweitig, I was excited to encounter the verb injunct, which was new to me, in a lawyer’s article for the law section of the Times, I think (no, it was in the Law Society Gazette) – but when searching, I found only this comment:

“injunct”? Whatever happened to “enjoin”? Are lawyers, whose profession is based on purported precision of language, becoming so ill-educated that they are ignorant of the root verb of “injunction”?

Since an injunction (einstweilige Verfügung, gerichtliche Anordnung) can order you to stop doing something, or to start doing something, I wondered how to use the verb in a sentence.

But it appears from the Oxford English Dictionary that injunct has been around for a while. Definition: ‘To prohibit or restrain by injunction. Now in somewhat more general use’. First example, 1872, also 1887 – both U.S. Then 1890 in the UK.

Ghits indicate a common use: ‘to injunct publication’, for example in the Law Society Gazette article mentioned:

The Formula One boss had ­previously lost his application to injunct the ­publication of details, photographs and video footage of his sexual activities because by the time he got to court 435,000 hits had been made on the online version of the article, and the video footage had been viewed approximately 1,424,959 times

The verb enjoin seems much harder to use. ‘Enjoin publication’ can be found, in legal texts, in the sense of preventing publication. But it can also mean the opposite: ‘To prescribe authoritatively and with emphasis (an action, a course of conduct, state of feeling, etc.)’, says the OED, meaning 2, whereas meaning 3 ‘To prohibit, forbid (a thing); to prohibit (a person) from (a person or thing)’ is ‘Now only in Law’.

I was wondering whether to translate Anglo-amerikanisches Recht as Anglo-American law. I think I will. It used to seem a bit of a Germanism to me. But better than Anglo-Saxon law, which my employer in Erlangen once put in the Vorlesungsverzeichnis as my speciality.

Anyway, while I was comparing site:uk and site:de ghits, I came across a reference to Donald R. Black at MeinProf.de, the site where students can grade their teachers. I have some materials of his, which are wonderful, and he is qualified in the USA, Britain and Germany. Don’t know if the materials are available outside Berlin. I was pleased to see that the sole person who graded him gave him very good marks – all 1 (A), but a mysterious 2 for interest. I’m also not sure if the writer got the course title quite right.

Google findet insoweitigen 59mal. Ist das ordentliches Rechtsdeutsch?

Is this word needed by people who want to stuff sentences with redundancies? I quote the Oberlandesgericht Köln rather than my confidential translation text:

Da die Prüfung solcher Mängel am Gemeinschaftseigentum – insbesondere Schallschutzmängel – derzeit Gegenstand von Gutachteraufträgen im gerichtlichen Verfahren beim LG Aachen ist, will die Eigentümergemeinschaft zunächst die insoweitigen Ergebnisse und die Vorlage der Gutachten abwarten, um anschließend hierüber gegebenenfalls zu beschließen.

It would be wrong to show only the glamorous sides of Fürth, like this:

It must also be reported that Greuther Fürth football supporters behaved badly last Friday. The team was playing against Offenbach, and although this is the age of GPS, the fans’ coach driver, after leaving the motorway to avoid a jam, failed to locate the Offenbach ground and the fans had to go back to Fürth. Whether the unexpected Offenbach victory by 1 – 0 had anything to do with the following violence I don’t know. The fans, aged between 16 and 22, landed in Poppenreuth and threw bottles onto the road and at passing cars.

When the police arrived, the fans took refuge in a pub when they threw bottles and chairs at the police. A 30-year-old policeman suffered an injury from a bottle to his head. The police produced truncheons, whereupon some fans barricaded themselves in an inner room, until the parents of one of them persuaded them to come out. TZ (the dpa report is similar in all papers):

Weil niemand den Weg nach Offenbach kannte, mussten die Fans, die meisten von ihnen junge Männer im Alter zwischen 16 und 22 Jahren, unverrichteter Dinge nach Fürth zurückkehren. Dort machten sie nach Angaben der Polizei ihrem Ärger Luft, indem sie im Stadtteil Poppenreuth Flaschen auf die Straße und gegen vorbei fahrende Autos warfen.

Als die von Anwohnern verständigte Polizei eintraf, flüchteten die jungen Männer in ein Vereinslokal und bewarfen die Polizisten, die ihnen dorthin folgten, mit Flaschen und Stühlen. Ein 30 Jahre alter Polizist wurde von einer Bierflasche am Kopf getroffen und verletzt.

Die Polizisten gingen mit Schlagstöcken gegen die Randalierer vor, von denen sich einige in einem Nebenraum der Kneipe verschanzten. Erst nach gutem Zureden der Eltern eines der jungen Männer konnten sie dazu bewegt werden, die Tür zu öffnen. Vier Männer wurden festgenommen. Gegen sie laufe ein Ermittlungsverfahren wegen gefährlicher Körperverletzung, sagte ein Polizeisprecher.