The reason I came by Ben’s notes on translations from the German was because I received an email from Jean-François in France, or at least via wanadoo.fr, on the topic of resp., which he said is OK in mathematics contexts. He had read on my blog that the abbreviation resp. doesn’t exist in English.

It is used in mathematics.
For an example, go to:
http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/symbol.htm
And search for “resp.” in the page.
Or do a Google search with: resp. mathematics.

I have to admit that this page and numerous other Ghits (© Trevor) cast serious doubt on my opinion. However, I do note that the author of this page is called Gérard P. Michon. He did his Ph.D. in Los Angeles, but there’s something not quite American about his name. And so it is with other Ghits (I haven’t looked at all of them).

So I wrote to Ben, who translates maths, but he didn’t seem too keen on resp. either.

Jean-François had been asked by an American technical writer from his company what he meant by resp. He also added – ‘just for fun’ – the following, which I pass on as I haven’t been able to digest it:

On supports of induced representations for symplectic and odd-orthogonal groups.
Abstract:
Let G be Sp(2n,F) (resp. SO(2n+1,F)), where F is a p-adic field of characteristic zero. In this paper, we give a correspondence which associates to an irreducible representation π of G an m-tuple of irreducible representations of lower rank symplectic (resp. orthogonal) groups based on the supercuspidal support of π. We show that this correspondence respects the induction and Jacquet module functors (in a sense to be made precise), as well as verifying a number of other useful properties. In essence, this correspondence allows one to isolate the effects of the different families of supercuspidal representations of general linear groups which appear in the support of π.

Meanwhile, someone else came to my site looking for resp. The search also threw up a discussion between some people in the USA on the use of respectively. One of them had written ‘Respectfully submitted by …’ and had this corrected to ‘Respectively submitted by …’ It was posited, of course, that this might be British usage. Finally the questioner decided to omit the word altogether.

I am proud to be able to present Ben Teague‘s checklist on ‘Was this text translated from the German?’ – all the way from Athens (that’s Athens, Georgia). I will comment on this separately.

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(1) Already misused in sentences like

*Already in 1969 human beings visited the Moon

. . . or, even worse,

*Human beings visited the moon already in 1969

This often comes from language such as bereits 1969. Better:

Human beings visited the Moon as early as 1969 (virtually the same meaning)
As early as 1969, human beings visited the Moon (nearly the same meaning, time stressed)
By 1969 human beings had visited the Moon (the meaning now a little distorted)
By 1969 human beings had already visited the Moon (with the schon item restored, but note that already implies a link to a further part of the discourse)

(2) Beziehungsweise. Several things can go wrong in the translation:

bq. (2a) Use of respectively as a conjunction. It isn’t one.
(2b) Use of the blatantly un-English abbreviation resp.
(2c) Rendering of beziehungsweise (bzw.) as *or in one of the cases when it doesn’t really mean that.
(2d) Use of respectively when it doesn’t accomplish anything.
(2e) Attempts to make respectively carry too much freight.

Cases (a) and (b) call for just one remark: Don’t ever make these errors.

Case (c) is deeper and more difficult. German writers use beziehungsweise to keep lists straight:

Die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines Sturms bzw. einer Flut ist hoch. The probability of a storm or (a) flood is high.

In this instance bzw. means exactly or. But the word also expresses distribution:

Die Feder bzw. Bleistifte sind blau bzw. schwarz. The pens and pencils are blue and black, respectively. (I.e., pens are blue and pencils are black.)

Avoid the almost meaningless

*The pens or pencils are blue or black

. . . and the even worse

*The pens and pencils are blue and black.

Case (d) is sometimes induced by special uses of bzw., for example:

Die Federn sind blau bzw. schwarz. The pens are blue or black.

The German sentence says that some pens are blue and some are black, not that each pen is blue and black. In my opinion,

*The pens are blue or (and) black, respectively

is usually a mistranslation because it contains the nonfunctioning last word.

Case (e) comes about because beziehungsweise in German is a good deal stronger than respectively. You can for example make multiply parallel structures such as

Die Feder bzw. Bleistifte bzw. Kugelschreiber sind aus Gänsekielen gefertigt bzw. stammen aus China bzw. enthalten Spiralfeder.

(It is barbaric, but technically not incorrect.) Consider

*The pens or pencils or ballpoints, respectively, are made from goose quills or (and) come from China or (and) contain coil springs.

It’s silly to follow German rules of distribution in English. The sentence expresses three thoughts and should be divided:

The pens are made from goose quills; the pencils come from China; the ballpoints contain coil springs.

(3) German-style hyphenation in compounds. Expressions like

Not-Aus-Knopf
Start-Seite
Sicherheits-Kontaktleiste

correctly become

Emergency off button
Home page (or homepage)
Safety edge switch

with no hyphens. If we have definite rules in this area, they are complicated. Native usage is the best guide. The next-best is that English most commonly builds short strings of nouns in “open” fashion, neither merged (*offbutton) nor hyphenated (*off-button). When an open compound functions as an adjective, however, it gets hyphens:

common-rail injector
porch-swing chain
pug-mill drive

Metro, Nuremberg:

I would call this Kloßteig, but my program won’t convert ß to SS in capitals.

From an ITI list I gather that on 6 December 2006 there is a one-day conference at the City University London on Translation on the Law.
There is also a free public lecture on forensic phonetics in the evening.

Talks on the City University M.A., the Metropolitan Police, and the ‘new national standards in translation’ being developed by CILT.

It is the first I have heard of this last, but here is a link.

Die Fürther Nachrichten berichten über die Reaktionen von Parteikollegen zu Landrätin Gabriele Paulis Internetforum zu Edmund Stoiber (für neue Einträge geschlossen).

Eine Lanze für seine Parteifreundin Pauli bricht Bernd Obst, Bürgermeister von Cadolzburg. Er bewundert den Mut, „den die Landrätin aufbringt, um zu sagen, was sie denkt“. Das habe nichts mit Nestbeschmutzung zu tun, zumal Pauli „viel Wahres sagt“. Auch den Internetvorstoß will Obst nicht in Bausch und Bogen verdammen. Zwar bevorzuge er den „innerparteilichen Weg“, aber: „Es ist ein absolut basisdemokratisches Element, die Bürger nach ihrer Meinung zu fragen.“

Die meisten anderen Kommentare sahen keine Notwendigkeit, die Bevölkerung einzubeziehen in die Frage, ob Stoiber 2008 wieder kandidieren soll. Einige waren böse:

Als „Geschmackssache“, die aber nicht seinen Geschmack treffe, bezeichnet der Vorsitzende der CSU in der Stadt Fürth und Staatssekretär im Verteidigungsministerium, Christian Schmidt, die Pauli-Kampagne. „Jeder hat so seine Spezialitäten“, kommentierte er die Affäre gestern lapidar von Brüssel aus, wo er sich auf EU-Einladung befindet.

Gabriele Pauli, who represents part of Fürth for the CSU in the Bavarian Landtag, has a forum on her site (now closed for new entries) where people can comment on whether Edmund Stoiber should stand for election again in 2008. Most of the CSU would prefer this topic to be discussed only within the party.

Another Neudeutsch term: Best Ager. This has been around for some time. I see that www.proz.com dealt with it in 2003, although some of the answers translated it in the wrong direction. Here’s a model agency for these people.

It means the over-forties in marketing speak. I recommend a Google image search on “best ager”.