I am taking the liberty of posting this announcement which I got from the legaltranslators group at Yahoo:

bq. City University, Centre for Language Studies is offering a one day
Legal Translation Seminar on Monday 27th June from 9am to 5pm, at our
main campus in Northampton Square. The morning session will be a
series of talks about various related topics as well as a comparative
study of the French and English legal systems and the German and
English legal systems. The afternoon session will be a 2 hour
interactive workshop based around the translation of a legal text.
The document will be translated, and the main traps and pitfalls
discussed. We offer 4 language combinations as follows: English into
French, French into English, German into English, English into German.

bq. The cost of the seminar is £110 (£95 concessions). The
deadline for registration is 12 June 2005. Further information
including a detailed programme of the day as well as the application
form can be found on our website
http://www.city.ac.uk/languages/seminar.
Alternatively you can email Erin Faulkner e.faulkner@city.ac.uk or
telephone +44 20 7040 3265

Actually there are seminars on June 3 and 4 too, on commercial and corporate law. I see that a City University centre for legal translation is planned and wonder what form that would take.

Angela Sigee, who is comparing English and German law and talking about EN>DE translation, is excellent. I don’t know the others, but have heard good reports of the seminars.

The Department of Applied Linguistics at Saarland University at Saarbrücken is doing an online survey of translators’ and interpreters’ use of terminology management and terminology extraction tools. It can be done here and is supposed to take about ten minutes. It is all in English.

Some of the questions are accompanied by an explanation. The terminology extraction tools mentioned were these:

TermExtract (Trados)
TermFinder (Xerox)
TermFinder (Acrolinx)
Term Finder (SDL)
Autoterm (IAI)

I felt a bit odd answering in English because I felt it was being asked by non-native speakers. So I wrote ‘studentische Hilfskraft’ once rather than trying to explain it in English.

After I had done the test I got a message saying I would be taken back to the home page:

bq. Sie werden in wenigen Sekunden zur Startseite der Fachrichtung 4.6 weitergeleitet…You will be redirec

But I wasn’t, so I hope they got the answers. 77 people have answered so far. The results will be sent to me by email.

PS Does anyone know why the main page of the applied languages department at Saarbrücken is ‘sticky’? I kept entering the Transblawg URL and returning there, but after a few seconds Saarbrücken reinstituted itself. The trouble with those people is that they know too much about software.
LATER NOTE: I have edited my links and removed the problem.

N24 quotes FAS (via vowe.net):

bq. Reporter: Mr. Lucas, könnten Sie bitte noch einmal den entscheidenden Satz wiederholen?
George Lucas: May the force be with you.
Simultanübersetzer [sic]: Am 4. Mai werden wir bei dir sein.

Wortfeld, usually a German-language blog, has an entry in English describing the background to Schröder’s announcement of autumn elections. There are a large number of links.

As Alexander rightly says, the coverage of German matters in the English-language press is often not very good (and vice versa of course).

bq. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and SPD chairman Franz Müntefering have announced their intention to hold early elections. However, German constitutional law doesn’t make that as easy as in many other countries. Article 68 of Germany’s Basic Laws allows the (otherwise relatively powerless) President to dissolve the Bundestag if the Chancellor loses a vote of confidence. However, Schröder’s coalition holds 306 of currently 603 seats, so Schröder’s troops would have to lose deliberately. Helmut Kohl did that in 1982, with early elections in early 1983 instead of late 1984. The Constitutional Court wasn’t too happy with this creative approach (full decision in German), but ultimately didn’t stop it (and will not do so this time), since all Bundestag parties agreed.

The Mail on Sunday reports that a French woman received a kidney of Princess Diana’s in Toulouse in 1997 and is now peppering her conversation with fragments of English. There are a number of suspicious elements to the story, however.

bq. “I found myself speaking English to my friends, something I don’t normally do because I have no reason to,” she says. “I cannot explain why I did this.”

bq. Is this evidence of a fanciful nature, or an indication she had indeed received an organ from an English-speaker? Improbable though it sounds, there are many documented accounts of organ recipients taking on characteristics of their donors. …

bq. Scientists have termed this phenomenon ‘cellular memory’. Professor Candice Pert, a molecular biologist, believes every cell has its own mind and, if transplanted, the cells of the first body carry messages into the second body.

I think Stephen King must have done something on this.

taz: ‘Peer und Er – Der Untergang’.

The Observer: ‘Well, Sith happens …’ (on Star Wars III)