For some reason best know to itself, the local paper had an article comparing criminal procedure throughout Europe on the front of their Magazin section at the weekend (Click to enlarge).

There is it again – that hackneyed old scene of the judges in their ceremonial wigs, probably at the Lord Chancellor’s Breakfast. I’m not sure what it tells us about criminal justice in Europe, though.

The topic of the article is: Germany has a very large proportion of judges, and they are overworked. So how do other countries manage with fewer (professional) judges?

German judges write more (in England you have the oral pronouncement of judgment, backed up by a transcript by a court reporter).

German courts have more witnesses physically present in court (at least in comparison with the Netherlands, Italy and France – I suspect not in comparison with Britain)

In German courts, it is easiest to use applications/motions to drag out proceedings

In Germany, special expedited proceedings are possible only for minor offences; elsewhere, if the accused agrees, expedited proceedings are possible when more is at stake.

Hanzi Smatter is a blog about the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture. With pictures – here’s a rug with the signs of the Chinese zodiac all shown as mirror images:

It is apparently a two-sided rug, so it was easy to place it differently.

Denglisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch (via Translationfound)

This Fruchtbringendes Wörterbuch could be very useful indeed. I have more than once had to translate Denglisch into English, and first of all I had to work out what it was supposed to mean. That can be difficult. It’s a shame that many contributors don’t know whether an English term is pseudo or not.

bq. Viele Wörter sehen aus, als wären sie englischen bzw. amerikanischen Ursprungs, werden aber von Menschen mit englischer Muttersprache nicht verstanden. Beispiele für pseudoenglische Wörter sind Showmaster, Handy, Oldtimer oder – besonders peinlich – Dressman.

Actually I missed the word Talkmaster, so I added it.

Some of the entries will be genuine English; in fact, far too many of them are. But that doesn’t matter to me as long as it gives good definitions of the words I need to translate (of course, it doesn’t always give good definitions, but that’s life, I suppose. It mentions Showmaster and defines it as Gastgeber. I defined Talkmaster as Moderator).

I noticed recently that Tchibo, who now sell in Britain too, were selling a magnetic notebook-holder, and in the picture someone had written ‘Toast’ as the first word of a shopping list. I suppose this was meant to work globally, but whereas a German might write ‘Toast’ or ‘Toastbrot’ on a shopping list, a British person wouldn’t.

Süddeutsche Zeitung über lawblog.

Giouri A., the defendant in a Munich court, charged with bewaffnetes Handeltreiben mit Betäubungsmitteln – armed drug dealing – on Tuesday morning suddenly produced a 20 cm (8″) nail, put a headlock on his Russian interpreter and pressed the nail against her neck. His defence counsel got the nail away from him before two court officers overpowered him.

The defence counsel, what’s more, was Sewarion Kirkitadse, a lawyer of Georgian extraction who appears on afternoon court TV shows in Germany. His photo shows his heroic qualities. *And* he has worked as an interpreter himself, for the fascinating Georgian language.

The Russian interpreter is described as Erina J., 50 (maybe Irina or Erika?). Since the defendant is in custody, one can’t help assuming he found the nail in the prison wall.

bq. Am Morgen war er mit einem Gefangenen-Transporter ins Gericht gebracht worden. Üblicherweise werden alle Häftlinge vor dem so genannten Schub noch einmal gründlich durchsucht. Ein Kripobeamter kündigte bereits „interne Ermittlungen“ zu dem Vorfall an.

I quoted that because I remember the ‘so genannten Schub’ – the trip by van to the prison, or the prison away from the court itself.

I saw this wall rather late:

For those who complain about seeing only half of my face on the blog, here is the whole thing. Unfortunately a lot of the background is missing:

The George Washington University Law School has some vocabulary tests and a drilling utility online. You can have the answer shown and decide yourself if you were right or wrong. The drills work in IE for me, not in Firefox, but that may be my setup.

The material comes from Profs. Gregory E. Maggs and Robert Brauneis, and there are some Internet links there too (including one to me!).