I have often envied Mrs. Tilton her detailed knowledge of spiders, but I had no idea she had experienced the Socratic method.

Byse was a slightly-built man who never raised his voice, yet students trembled in fear of him. Heaven help the unprepared student, because Byse wasn’t about to. In one famous instance, he called upon a hapless student to state the facts of a case.

“Umm, I’m sorry,” confessed the suddenly ashen-faced unfortunate, “I have to admit I haven’t read it.”

“That’s OK,” said Byse with terrifying calmness, opening his pocket watch and putting it on the podium in front of him. “Read it now. We have all the time in the world.”

And so the doomed youth sat there for ten or fifteen interminable minutes, reading the appellate opinion with the weight of his classmates’ 400 eyes upon him, damning the day he ever crawled forth from his mother’s womb. …

And yet there was really no need for fear. To profit from Byse’s lectures one really had to do only two things. First: read, and think about, the materials. But that goes without saying for any course, I’d say. Second: stop worrying about looking the fool. Under the Socratic method, you are never right (and if on occasion you are, the lecturer will change the facts so that you’re suddenly wrong). Get past those two humps, and Byse would help you to an understanding of how contracts work, and why. I can’t imagine how many thousands of students he helped over the years. We shall not see his like again.

Obituary here.

Shock of the day: this dictionary arrived in the post (see earlier entry).

Date on book: 2005 (preface 2004)
Date on CD-ROM: 2007 (content 2006)

ISBN 3-89699-192-2
Price c. 50 euros

Gesetzesentwurf für Nordrhein-Westfalen

A Problem
Das Bundesverwaltungsgericht hat mit Urteil vom 16.01.2007 (6 C 15.06) die Bestimmungen über die allgemeine Beeidigung von Dolmetschern und Ermächtigung von Übersetzern für die Gerichte und Notariate des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz als Berufsausübungsregelung im Sinne des Artikel 12 Abs. 1 Satz 2 GG bewertet, die einer normativen Regelung durch den Gesetzgeber bedarf. Entsprechendes gilt für Nordrhein-Westfalen.

The German Länder / states that haven’t yet passed a statute governing certified interpreters and translators are now doing so. This is a draft of the NRW one. It studiously avoids the term beglaubigt, and it prescribes wording to be placed at the end of the translation. I see no reference to a stamp or seal.

(Announced on the pt list at yahoogroups.com by Marisa Manzin)

The (new) legal writer wrote about the word shall recently, with a link to Ken Adams, and in particular an article by Ken in the New York Law Journal.

Not many German lawyers are going to feel they have got their money’s worth if a contract translation does not contain a few shalls. I agree that it’s probably best to take an intermediate line – neither completely avoid shall like the modernists (following a movement in the English-speaking legal world outside the USA; see Clarity) nor use it very liberally.

When to use it? I would stick to obligation in the third person singular (‘The tenant shall pay the rent at the beginning of each month’). To quote the NYLJ article:

One way to address overuse of “shall” is through more disciplined use of the word. I advocate using “shall” only to express an obligation that’s imposed on the subject of a sentence in the active voice – “Doe shall purchase the shares from Acme.” (But if a contract uses the first or second person – that’s sometimes the case with letter agreements – your best bet would be to treat it as analogous to a consumer contract and not use “shall.”)

It would be better to have an active subject, not ‘The rent shall be paid…’ – who is to pay it? But translators can’t change their original if that’s what it says.

There are some cases where courts have had to interpret what ‘shall’ meant, but that should not be the case if you translate a German text where the German is to prevail: the court would have to interpret the German, not the English.

Boing Boing gives a link to a site with pictures of odd office equipment – a good opportunity to present a photo of my nose pencil sharpener.

Novalis is the subject of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel The Blue Flower. That novel, which is on my list of ‘must read again’, has a curious way of placing the reader in 18th-century Germany by rendering German speech and writing in a rather literal way, a kind of translatorese: characters are called ‘the Bernhard’, ‘the Mandelsloh’, ‘Söphgen’.

‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’
Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.
‘You are beautiful, gracious Fräulein,’ said Fritz.
…
Rahel saw that, whatever else, young Hardenberg was serious. She allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did not mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedrime as a sedative, if his mind was too active – only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains.

languagehat reported recently that Jeremy Osner of READIN is inviting readers to help produce a translation of Hymnen an die Nacht. He presents George MacDonald’s translation, which he finds unsatisfactory, opposite the German and a working version of his own translation in between.

This is great fun, and would be even more so if one actually wanted to translate Hymnen an die Nacht into English.