1. The January edition of the Journal of Specialised Translation, JoSTrans, is out. This publication is well worth looking at and has plenty in its archives too.

It has a review by Pieta Monks of London Metropolitan University of Deborah Cao’s Translating Law, and also an informative article by Deborah Cao herself and Xingmin Zhao about translating at the UN. The review is extremely positive and points out that the book is for both translators without a legal background and lawyers without translation training. I find a problem in Deborah Cao’s book is precisely that it covers many languages and thus many legal systems and therefore is necessarily superficial.

According to the review:

She presents a wealth of practical examples to illustrate the differences, helping trainee legal translators avoid particular pitfalls. The description of the differing terms and functions of the legal profession in English speaking countries and in non-English speaking countries (due, of course, to differences in education and training) will be particularly useful to students, (e.g. barristers and solicitors in England, attorneys in the US and avocats and notaires in France etc.) (60-62). I also was very interested in the rationale behind the complex syntactical structures typical of certain English legal texts and, in particular, the origin of apparent pairs of similes, word strings, which are designed to create all-inclusiveness:

But Cao’s definition of barristers and solicitors is the old chestnut ‘one works in court and the other doesn’t’, and the word ‘counsel’ does not have an S on the end in the plural. I have cut off the explanation of legal doublets such as devise and bequeath (here, but not in the book, mysteriously rendered as ‘advise and bequeath’). I would have been interested to read a review by a specialist, but then again, the book is probably not written for specialists. It is very full, has an excellent bibliography, and covers many interesting areas of legal translation – to be recommended as an appetizer for those who haven’t thought much about the subject before.

2. Among the other articles is an amazing discourse with heavy academic underpinning, by Gerrit Bayer-Hohenwarter – in German – on Zeit(druck) and Translation. Here’s a taster:

Die folgenden Forschungsergebnisse und Überlegungen stützen die These, wonach der erfolgreiche Umgang mit Zeitdruck expertiseabhängig ist und sich erst in der Berufspraxis in vollem Umfang entwickeln kann:

• Erfahrene ÜbersetzerInnen sind sicherer im Umgang mit konstruktiven Maßnahmen zur Frustrations- und Stressreduktion wie etwa das vorübergehende Aufschieben von Problemlösungen (vgl. Dancette 1997, Tirkkonen-Condit 2000: 123, Krings 2001: 513) oder zeitsparenden pragmatischen Strategien wie individuellen Merkhilfen (vgl. Séguinot 1997: 109, Englund Dimitrova 2005: 109f) und (vorläufigen)
wörtlichen Übersetzungen zur vorläufigen Erweiterung der Kapazität ihres Arbeitsgedächtnisses (Englund Dimitrova 2005).

3. There is also a review of a French book about the translation of statutes, which would interest me, but it’s in Spanish. The book considers the translations into French of the German and Swiss Civil Codes in about 1900.

4. While reading old articles in BDÜ info NRW recently, I came across a report by Dr. Cirsten Verleger on a seminar on time management held by Andreas W. Schiemenz in the October 2005 edition. Here is an extract – I would like to know if this seminar was quite as good (wertvoll) as it is said to be:

Vor mir liegt mein Zeitplaner mit den Terminen für heute und den beiden zu erledigenden A-Prioritäten. Natürlich habe ich mir insgesamt nur 3 bis 4 Aufgaben vorgenommen und nur 50 % meiner Zeit verplant. Neben mir die als Wiedervorlage-System dienende Hängeregistratur mit 31 Tagesfächern für diesen Monat und 12 Monatsfächern. Am Montag hatte ich zwischen 10:50 h und 12:50 h einen „Termin mit mir selbst“ und habe meine Lebensvision und konkret definierte und messbare Ziele erarbeitet – und außerdem meine sieben Lebenshüte für dieses Jahr festgelegt. Anschließend habe ich meine alte, fünf DIN-A-4-Seiten lange „To-do“-Liste auf einzelne Zettel umverteilt, nach A-, B-, C- und D-Prioritäten sortiert, die D-Prioritäten in den Papierkorb wandern lassen und die übrigen in das Wiedervorlage-System eingeordnet. Puuh! – Da die Post erst gegen 10:00 h kommt und ich das Fach 8 der Wiedervorlage noch nicht inspiziert habe, sind die drei Ablagen auf meinem Schreibtisch leer.

Brillentrockner

From a letter to the Editor, TLS, 25 January 2008:

Sir, – As most of the TLS is still written in British rather than American English, Leo A. Lensing’s translation of “Arsch mit Ohren” as “an ass with ears” (January 11) calls for comment, since most readers would naturally expect an ass to have ears.

You can certainly buy Stollen at Christmas in Lidl and Aldi in the UK (Upminster now has an Aldi), but on the whole their ranges are British, as is shown by their Burns Night offerings (which I missed, of course). The following partial screenshot is taken from Google’s cache. It is no longer available at the Lidl UK site.

Click to enlarge, as usual (my thumbnails are rather small, but I haven’t yet investigated how to change their size in Serendipity).

Gareth McLean discusses the kilt in the Guardian today.

He feels that although it isn’t bad for twenty-five quid, it just doesn’t feel like the real thing (£375-odd):

To be fair, you can’t really tell with the kilt – at least, not from across the room. (The sporran, on the other hand, is cheap and nasty and no mistake.) It’s made with five yards of material – as opposed to the more usual eight – and though that material is machine-washable polyviscose, and not the finest wool woven lovingly on looms in bleakly beautiful corners of the Highlands and then turned into kilts by skilled craftsmen and women whose families have been kiltmakers for centuries, it’s certainly not as shoddy as I’d feared.

And yet, there’s still something wrong with this bargain-basement version of Scottish national dress. Never mind that the shirt has an unpleasant echo of early Spandau Ballet, the kilt simply doesn’t have the import it would if it cost what it should rather than what it can be made for in a cut-price factory somewhere.

(My heading is influenced by a statement by a German carers’ association today, complaining about the low wages of its members: McPflege darf nicht um sich greifen. Is Mc a new Denglish prefix in German?)

Beaming Prince Charles in to a conference in Abu Dhabi is said to have saved 20 tonnes of carbon waste. He must be heavier than I thought.

Video at Gizmodo UK.

The election campaign continues outside, and I now have more SPD pens than CSU. The Green Party offer a green version of the folding cow:

This can be found online: direct link, indirect link, or just use Google. Or maybe you prefer the origami cow: