(This was not reported speech at all – see the evidence and discussion in the comments. Back to the drawing-board!)

There’s a query on ProZ that I can’t help mentioning. It’s a quote from the judgment of a German court and the asker requests that it should be answered by native speakers of German. I think it’s not always easy for native speakers of German to understand the grammar of their language, unless they’ve taught it to foreigners.

Anyway, the sentence is ‘Durch das der Klage stattgebende Urteil stünde jedoch auch fest, dass das Arbeitsverhältnis mit dem in der BRD ansässigen Arbeitgeber beendet worden und auf einen Arbeitgeber übergegangen ist, an dessen Sitz die EG-Richtlinie 2001/23 EWG nicht gilt. Im Ergebnis stünde der Arbeitnehmer schutzlos dar.’ [MM italics]

The query relates to the meaning of the subjunctive here. This is a sentence typical of German judgments, where the subjunctive makes it clear to the reader that it’s indirect speech, and in English the past tense doesn’t, so it’s worth adding ‘the court held’ every so often, to make it clear this is a quotation of what the lower court said, not the opinion of the present court.

So what did the lower court say, in direct speech? It said ‘es steht jedoch fest’. So you could write ‘the court stated that the judgment in favour of the plaintiff made it clear’, or even, avoiding any backshifting of verbs, ‘according to the court, the judgment in favour of the plaintiff makes it clear’.

Most of the answers are variations on ‘would be clear’. Indirect speech is mentioned in an ‘agree’, but it isn’t really brought out.

Anyone who’s translated a few judgments will recognize this usage. For the use of the subjunctive in reported speech (the form ‘stehe es jedoch fest’ would also be possible), see the nice site on the German language, canoonet.

After my flippant remarks about Ann Widdecombe in the comments, and being about to translate another monastery guide, I wonder if this book might help my general education.

You can see the contents, index and a couple of pages.

It also exists in a German version.

(Note snow)
It’s hard to tell if this is intentional or not. Mind you, the firm has an even more worrying Triple Willy on its website.

The German Auswärtiges Amt (or the Federal Foreign Office, as it calls itself) has long since published a list of German court names and their translations into English, French and Spanish.

I see this list has now been augmented to contain Russian, Bulgarian, Italian, Polish, Macedonian, Croatian and Turkish.

Of course (as often discussed), that doesn’t mean that the original German name of the court should be omitted from a translation, nor that these versions have to be used if you don’t work for a ministry. Nor have I any idea how useful most of the translations are. I quite like Local Court for Amtsgericht precisely because it does not conjure up a particular court in any English-language country. But that’s another topic.