John Mesirow – always worth reading – reports on More Weird and Wacky British Laws.

This lot come from the Daily Mirror on March 20. But they have surely been round the Internet a few times – BBC News reported them last November. Probably they originate from some no longer acknowledged book, which in turn got them from a dubious source.

I am wondering about

IT is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament. We’re not sure what the punishment for this particular offence would be.

Too true: of course there is no punishment. What is meant by ‘illegal’?

My understanding was that deaths in the House of Commons or House of Lords are reported as happening outside the building. Wikipedia has more on this:

No one is allowed to die within the Palace of Westminster, because, as it is a royal palace, any person who dies there would eligible for a royal funeral.[33] Most deaths on the premises are said to have taken place at St. Thomas’ Hospital, the nearest hospital to the palace.[34]

Wikipedia quotes BBC News and the Daily Telegraph as sources.

It’s been widely reported that an EU ban on Brazilian beef sausage casings has threatened the Swiss national sausage, the cervelat. Most other sausage casings fail to curl and split. truly madly deeply was concerned.

It now appears that sausage casings from Paraguay may escape the ban. Paraguayan farmers can’t afford to feed their cattle anything that would give them BSE.

A class-action lawsuit in Ontario was filed in April alleging that the government uses an inadequate test for court interpreters.

This was reported by the Globe and Mail – original article available for payment. It can also be found on Lia Barros’ Portuguese translation weblog, It’s all about translations, here.

The suit alleges that despite years of clear warnings and complaints from judges, Crown prosecutors, defence counsel and even its own staff, the government still uses an inadequate test for interpreters (for half the languages interpreted in the province’s courts, no attempt is made to even evaluate the candidate’s fluency in the second language) and still uses those who either don’t take or fail even that minimal test.

A mistrial was declared in Mr. Sidhu’s first trial because of incompetent translation; the interpreter had used the word “Henh?” to indicate a lack of comprehension, 27 times in a 36-page transcript.Mr. Sidhu was convicted in a second trial, with different interpreters, and sentenced to six months in jail.

Exciting stuff, so no excuse for not reporting it earlier.

A spot of machine translation at www.tourism-guide.org. Ingolstadt:

The Muenster to beautiful our love the woman or dear woman cathedral is a lategothical resounding church in Ingolstadt. Remarkably for 15. Century is the over hitting a corner position of the two towers.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber (aka Rothenburg whether that deaf ones):

It is remarkable at from the outside simply working gothical church that she possesses two differently high towers. One of the towers is 57 m and other 55 m highly. In this important church the famous holy blood altar of the Bildschnitzers Tilman belt cutter on the west loft, whom it carved around 1500 for a holy blood Reliquie, is. The Reliquie is kept thereby in a rock crystal cap of the Reliquienkreuzes. (approx. 1270)

Note also the organ with 5500 whistles. There is more.

zonebattler has an allotment not far from Fürth railway station, with a view of a large number of railway lines, when he occasionally posts informed photos of various obscure locomotives.

On Saturday he was able to take several shots of the latest reconstruction of the Adler, the first train in Germany in 1835 (the last one was destroyed in a fire a couple of years ago). He even has a video of it going back to Nuremberg (scroll down). And some close-ups in a later entry.

Almost more exciting is the shot of a large pheasant he startled a week before. I haven’t yet seen these in the town centre either.

Anhang is a great German word. A bit like Anlage in technical texts, it can be used in all sorts of contexts, where the English might vary. Actually, Anlage is an alternative to Anhang in legal texts too. This is more about English usage than German usage, though.

The English equivalents are multiple and confusing.

1. enclosure: something enclosed in a letter, usually. It implies an envelope, in which you can enclose something.
At the end of a business letter, after your signature, you can write Enclosure(s)

2. exhibit: the Anlage to a document filed at court. And also, I gather, often in contracts in the USA, and at least also in statutory declarations in England.

There is an objection to this in a recent comment from a German lawyer, who says that only the document itself and not the Anlagen is evidence (ein Beweisstück) in German law.
I counter this by saying that there are two meanings of exhibit, in which Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law agrees with me: a) evidence b) a document labeled with an identifying mark (as a number or letter) and appended to a writing (as a brief) to which it is relevant. Gifis and OED don’t agree, but Black’s does:

exhibit 1. a document, record, or other tangible object formally introduced as evidence in court.
2. A document attached to and made part of a pleading, motion, contract, or other instrument.

I’ve actually been checking a discussion on the legaltranslators list at Yahoo Groups, and a translator in the USA had a huge file of US contracts collected over the years – and every one used the term exhibit. This was new to me, but see quote from Black’s above.

At all events, in my experience a pleading (Schriftsatz) is not evidence in English law, and a contract certainly is not evidence at the date it is signed, so the question doesn’t arise.

3. attachment: this refers to anything you attach to email, including a document, an image, an MP3 file or any other file. It should only be used in email, but I imagine its use is growing.

There are a couple of narrow usages that are also fairly clear:

4. In Austria, samt Anhang (s. A.), referring to a sum of money, means something like with supplementary charges

5. In financial statements, Anhang can be translated Notes to financial statements.

After this, we get into the murky waters of differences between British and American English and what to do with contracts and statutes.

Some available terms are schedule, annex(e), appendix, rider, supplement. (Apparently South Africa and some other places use annexure).

6. appendix is a great neutral term for those working for both Britain and the USA. It’s widely understood, perhaps from its use in books, and is acceptable in both countries. I’m not the only translator who uses this as ‘neutral’. I encountered one other who uses appendix all the time, except for very technical appendixes (appendices, if you like) to contracts, which he calls technical specifications.

Unlike appendix, annex(e) and schedule are terms most often used in legalese, and therefore tempting to use. I only say the minimum about these two important terms below, but may expand later.

7. schedule – it seems more British to me than annexe. It is commonly used in statutes as well as contracts.

8. annex(e), without the e seems more common to me in US English. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage disagrees, saying it appears more frequently in BrE than AmE, and in both more frequently in legal than nonlegal writing. But Garner doesn’t mention schedule at all, at least not under S.