German court supplies translation of indictment late

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Further to the last post on an infringement of the right to a fair hearing, the Burhoff online blog reports (in German) on a decision (PDF) of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice) against a criminal chamber of Aachen Regional Court (Landgericht). The criminal chamber did not supply the defendant with a translation of the indictment until the seventh day of the trial and then refused leave to stay the proceedings. The two defendants, from the Dominican Republic, were charged with drug dealing in a not small quantity and the decision of the BGH was based on Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (for any British journalists reading, that has nothing to do with the EU).

Google helping the police in Essen

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In December 2015 the police in Essen questioned a speaker of Arabic who they suspecting of stealing a jacket and some drinks from a supermarket. As they could not understand Arabic, they consulted Google Translate, RP Online reports. As the paper points out, this appears to be an infringement of the right to a fair hearing (Anspruch auf rechtliches Gehör). The police say they used the program to establish the man’s identity. It looks as if there will be no conseqences, since the man was given an interpreter the next day and at following hearings. The public prosecutor’s office in Düsseldorf confirmed what had happened, but did not answer the question as to whether the police often use Google Translate.

(via law blog: Google übersetzt für die Polizei)

They studied German (2) Neil MacGregor

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This isn’t a big surprise as Neil MacGregor, when he was Director of the British Museum, organized the exhibition called German: Memories of a Nation. I wrote a sniffy report on it in an earlier post. There are definitely good things in the book, however, and so in theory one could read about them or look at the maps at leisure – they seemed to me very diverse and complex, and so unsuitable for being absorbed in the course of viewing an exhibition. The book will be coming out in paperback on April 7.

There’s a video of the exhibition on this British Museum page, showing MacGregor’s theme that when the two Germanies were united 25 years ago, they had no shared history, but shared memories. A map shows over 200 currencies representing separated states, each with its own legal system, army etc. There was also a radio series of 15-minute programmes – they can be downloaded as podcasts indefinitely.

I was aware that MacGregor had studied modern languages at Oxford, but Wikipedia lists his alma mater as New College Oxford, École Normale Supérieure, University of Edinburgh and Courtauld Institute of Art – he has even more almae matres or alma maters than I have (KCL, College of Law, Institute of Education). He was a law student at Edinburgh and was called to the Bar in 1972, and to crown it all:

on a Courtauld Institute (University of London) summer school in Bavaria, the Courtauld’s director Anthony Blunt spotted MacGregor and persuaded him to take a master’s degree under his supervision. Blunt later considered MacGregor “the most brilliant pupil he ever taught”.

KCL German play

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King’s College German Play, Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit), had its first night on 7 March and there is another performance on 11 March. I saw it with another former King’s student. Everything has changed since the late sixties. The students are a mix of nationalities and subjects – European Studies, European Politics, War Studies, Comparative literature. It was an excellent production with great pace. It really was over in 2 hours so they must have cut quite a bit; the play is rather wordy. Some of the students speak very fluent German.

There are English surtitles – actually a block of text from a translated version of the play. Obviously it had to be cut to the right length, but was it a published version or done by the students themselves? I saw this with Nathan der Weise in Berlin, where they had a rather aged English translation.

The play was on in a place called Tutu’s on the 4th floor of the Macadam Building in Surrey Street. It was dreadfully cold there! The performance used projected images and sound effects – for instance the trains passing through at the beginning – and few props (I missed the coffin, but it wouldn’t have worked here). Desmond Tutu is an alumnus and a rather weird sculpture of his head is above the door:

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We went in memory of the plays we remembered from our own time as students, shockingly 50 years ago. I remember Biedermann und die Brandstifter in 1966 and Minna von Barnhelm in 1967. The current offering is an old chestnut too. But it’s still being performed in the real world and you can see video clips from Bochum, Zurich, and Berlin online (probably there are more out there too).

The KCL version is on a bare stage – here are some photos I stole from the KCL German Society Twitter feed:

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A mere conduit?

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Under the E-Commerce Regulations, an ISP can escape liability for content because it is a mere conduit.

Conduit in the figurative sense: the OED says

4. fig. The channel or medium by which anything (e.g. knowledge, influence, wealth, etc.) is conveyed;

But currently in the USA, there is an argument as to whether an interpreter or translator is a mere conduit.

I suppose that’s how some customers see us.

When the police use an interpreter in an interrogation and do not record the defendant’s words but only the translation of them into English, can the interpreter be challenged legally? Lawrence Solan writes in his Balkinization blog:

An interesting question concerning forensic linguistics is making its way through the appellate courts: When the police use an interpreter during an interview (or interrogation) of a suspect who later becomes a defendant in a prosecution, and the defendant’s words in her original language are not recorded, does the defendant have a constitutional right to confront the interpreter? As a cost-saving measure, more and more law enforcement agencies, and some courts, have been retaining services that interpret the interview over the telephone. One of them, Language Line Solutions. http://www.languageline.com/, has found itself in the middle of this constitutional question.
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courts should be more realistic in their understanding of what interpreters and translators can do. First, courts should stop relying on the “conduit” theory of translation. Compare two reputable translations of any work of literature. They will be similar in some ways, different in others. To the extent that word choice matters in the context of a criminal prosecution, nuanced differences may affect a case’s outcome. Second, interpreters make errors. The legal system should recognize this. Third, courts should not accept as accurate representations that the entire professional staff of a private firm retained by the government is dispassionate and of high professional character. Surely the defendant need not accept such representations.

Solan recommends that at least the original statements should be recorded as potential evidence.

They studied German (1) Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown

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While UK university German departments are closing down and German is less and less popular as a school subject, let’s look at some people who studied German, or perhaps just learnt it, in the past.

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Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown studied modern languages with an emphasis on German at Edinburgh University. It was Ernst Udet who suggested to Brown that he should learn German.

In 1936 Brown’s father took him to the Olympics in Berlin, where they met Hermann Göring and Ernst Udet, both First World War fighter aces. Udet took young Brown flying in a two-seat Bucker Jungmann from Halle airfield and, after throwing the aircraft around the skies, declared that Brown had the temperament of a fighter pilot and must learn to fly.

He interrogated Göring at the Nuremberg Trials too. He said when Göring held out a hand to him to shake on parting, he was unable to take it, but instead it occurred to him to say ‘Hals- und Beinbruch’, which he described as the traditional pilots’ greeting, although that seems a narrow view.

There’s a bit about his studies in a video on an Edinburgh University site. He studied German with subsidiary French from 1937 (finishing after the war in 1947), and the Foreign Office said he should spend six months in Germany and six in France after his second year, so he went as an English assistant to Salem School in summer 1939. Of his 18 pupils, 17 died in the war and the survivor had only one leg.