It can be interesting to combine a legal qualification with another specialization. The Los Angeles Times reports on an attorney and ship’s captain who repossesses ships all over the world. He runs a business called Vessel Extractions, together with an admiralty lawyer.

Steering ships back into the waters of more reliable jurisdictions involves subterfuge and sometimes witchcraft. International waters are described as ‘worse than the Wild West’.

BEFORE repossessing a ship, they make sure the vessel has been seized illegally and the claims filed against it are fraudulent.
If negotiations and legal methods fail, the company will proceed with an extraction, a step that might include payments to local officials if a nation’s government is corrupt.
Those payments, Hardberger said, are made under exceptions in the federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from bribing foreign officials to retain or obtain business.

What about the Federal Voodoo Act? There’s a great story about the retaking of a ship from Haiti,

Hardberger managed to get the guards off the ship by offering to buy fuel. When they came down to the dock to discuss the transaction, off-duty Haitian riot police hired by Hardberger held them at bay.
MEANWHILE, an oceangoing tugboat also hired by Hardberger slipped into port and backed up to the Aztec Express. Under a full moon, the crew began cutting the anchor chains with blowtorches.
In case harbor officials noticed and tried to call for help on their cellphone, Hardberger had paid a witch doctor $100 to cast spells on the port’s soccer field. The witch doctor marked the field with gray powder, a clear warning to believers in voodoo, the nation’s dominant religion. No call ever went out.

(The soccer field was the only place where mobile phones worked). Hardberger has also written a novel, Freighter Captain.

Learn all about pirates at ecani.com.

Via Boing Boing and the pirates of the Costa Dorada

I really ought to week out some dead weblogs from my blog roll. Of course one doesn’t want all of them to be active all the time, but some of them are greatly missed. The demise of Open Brackets was a sad loss, to say nothing of Translation from the Trenches and Legalesed.

Here’s a promising new one, though: Heidi Kerschl writes in German and English at HeidiLives&Learns.

Via Oversetter (thanks for the kind words)

Germans learn word division at school, because they have to do it in handwriting (some German words won’t even fit on one line). English speakers encounter it first in MS Word.

Most of my German clients deliver electronic files, and they seem to like both the left and right margins to be justified (Blocksatz). I don’t understand that, but I suppose we don’t all have to be the same.

Turn off automatic word division if you go into English. It isn’t as necessary as in German.

But what do you do when you have to revise word divisions in proofs for a booklet that has to be published? Here are a few I did yesterday. The asterisks mark the division given in the layout, the second versions with hyphens my corrections:

recogniz*ed: Trennung, wenn überhaupt, recog-nized
move*ment: nicht trennen, da am Ende einer Seite
cour*tyard: Trennung kann nur court-yard sein
Carolingi*an: Trennung, wenn überhaupt, Carolin-gian
lar*ger: nicht trennen
architectu*re: Trennung architec-ture
symboliz*ed: Trennung symbol-ized
hig*hest: Trennung high-est
cha*racteristic: Trennung char-acteristic
massi*ve: nicht trennen, ob am Ende einer Seite oder überhaupt
qua*drangle: Trennung quad-rangle
baro*que: Trennung bar-oque

Most of these are obvious, and perhaps I should just leave non-obvious ones alone, but I am attracted by the Oxford Mini-Dictionary of Spelling. I know I bought another one once and found it had all the U.S. divisions (they go by syllables rather than by derivation). U.S. divisions can be found in Merriam-Webster’s.

But this Hyphenologist site gives good rules at the end, and it shows how all the books disagree with each other and within publishers. It’s the kind of site that makes you think the best thing to do is to go back to bed.

(Thanks to Philip on the ITI GerNet mailing list)

Yes, I was afraid of this.

Your Inner European is Dutch!

Open minded and tolerant. You’re up for just about anything.

The questions looked a bit too obvious (I like the zany design of the recent animal quiz and others on that site)

Via Larko

This was reported last Friday: the German Federal Social Security Court (Bundessozialgericht) held that the translation of instructions for use is not creative. The context was a request by the Kunstlersozialkasse for contributions from a business. That pensions and health fund only admits members who do most of their translation for publication, so I would have thought there were other justifications for turning the Kasse down.

Kassel (dpa) – Übersetzungen von Gebrauchsanweisungen sind keine kreativen publizistischen Werke. Das hat das Bundessozialgericht in Kassel in einem am Freitag veröffentlichten Urteil zum Streit zwischen der Künstlersozialkasse und einem Elektrounternehmen aus Nordrhein-Westfalen entschieden. Nach Überzeugung des dritten Senats hat die Kasse zu Unrecht Sozialabgaben von rund 2700 Euro verlangt.

Die Firma hatte Bedienungsanleitungen und Werbebroschüren ins Englische und in andere Sprachen übersetzen lassen. Bei solchen Arbeiten fehle der Interpretationsspielraum, den es bei literarischen Übersetzungen gebe, urteilten die Sozialrichter. Er sei daher keine publizistische Leistung, sondern gewissermaßen nur eine Kopie des Originaltextes, wie sie auch ein Übersetzungscomputer liefern könne.

I think one would need to see the whole decision, because if the court said ‘not kreative publizistische works’, one doesn’t know which adjective the emphasis is on. I also have no idea if this has implications for the other courts in other aspects of translation and creativity.

The report was here but has scrolled.
(Reported by Marisa Manzin on the pt group at Yahoo)

The story of the brother and sister in east Germany who had four children was reported in the Guardian yesterday.

The couple, who live near Leipzig, grew up separately and only met many years later. Their supporters say they will fight until incest is no longer regarded as a criminal offence, arguing that the law is out of date. They say it harks back to the racial hygiene laws of the Third Reich and should be overturned in favour of freedom of choice and sexual determination. Detractors insist that incest should remain a social taboo, largely because of the risks linked to inbreeding and the imbalance in social relations it inevitably causes.

It does appear that incest is not a crime in Belgium, the Netherlands and France, and according to Wikipedia also not in Luxembourg, Portugal, Turkey, Japan, Argentina, Brazil and some other Latin American countries. And the German three-year prison sentence and removal of the children seem quite inappropriate.

In England and Wales, incest was not a crime till 1908, but was dealt with by the church courts. It’s now governed by the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which can be looked up here. Prison sentences seem reserved for men or boys who knowingly have sexual intercourse with a daughter, sister etc.

Here’s the Strafgesetzbuch:

§ 173 Beischlaf zwischen Verwandten
(1) Wer mit einem leiblichen Abkömmling den Beischlaf vollzieht, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu drei Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft.
(2) 1Wer mit einem leiblichen Verwandten aufsteigender Linie den Beischlaf vollzieht, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu zwei Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft; dies gilt auch dann, wenn das Verwandtschaftsverhältnis erloschen ist. 2Ebenso werden leibliche Geschwister bestraft, die miteinander den Beischlaf vollziehen.
(3) Abkömmlinge und Geschwister werden nicht nach dieser Vorschrift bestraft, wenn sie zur Zeit der Tat noch nicht achtzehn Jahre alt waren.

Does this mean you don’t need to be aware? The question first came up in connection with the Abstammungsurkunde, the full-form birth certificate, which may tell people they’re adopted but won’t necessarily give the name of the blood father.