I gather that Harrap and Dalloz have just published a small (well, cheap) French>English law dictionary.

When I wrote about Ewald Osers’ translation of Thomas Bernhard, I found out that there had been at least one other translator of more than one Bernhard novel. That was David McLintock. Among other things he translated Wittgensteins Neffe, and there’s a block here.

Wittgensteins Neffe is one of the more autobiographical books, which I particularly like. The translation seems excellent. Here’s a bit from a section on Viennese coffee houses:

bq. At the Sacher I could get all the newspapers, which I have always had to have since the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, and could spend hours study[ing] them in one of the comfortable corners of the left-hand lounge without being disturbed. I can still see myself sitting there for whole mornings, scanning the pages of Le Monde or The Times and never having my enjoyment interrupted for a moment; as far as I recall I was never disturbed at the Sacher. At the literary coffeehouse I could never have devoted myself to the newspapers for a whole morning without interruption; before so much as half an hour had passed I would have been disturbed by some writer making his entrance, accompanied by his retinue. I always found such company distasteful because it deflected me from my real intentions, rudely impeding what I considered essential and never facilitating it, as I would have wished. The literary coffeehouses have a foul atmosphere, irritating to the nerves and deadening to the mind. I have never learned anything new there but only been annoyed and irritated and pointlessly depressed. At the Sacher I was never irritate[d] or depressed, or even annoyed, and very often I was actually able to work — in my own fashion, of course, not in the fashion of those who work in the literary coffeehouses. At the Brauenerhof [Braeunerhof], above which my friend had lived for years before we met, I am still put off by the foul aim [air] and the poor lighting, which is kept down to a minimum — doubtless from perverse considerations of economy — and in which I have never been able to read a single line without effort. I also disliked the seating, which is inevitably damaging to the spinal column, however briefly one sits there — to say nothing of the pungent smell that emanates from the kitchen and very soon get into one’s clothes.

But the name McLintock rang a bell – when I was a postgraduate student at London University, a McLintock taught at the same college as one of my friends, so I often heard his name as one of the cast in some story or other, but I never knew who he was.

A bit of Internet research revealed that David McLintock was a medievalist and scholar of linguistics and retired from university life at 51 to be a translator. and he died on October 16 2003, at the age of 72.

So I searched out an obituary – it was December by the time I did this – and found one in the Independent archives, dated November 3 2003 and costing something to buy. So presumably it’s still there.

And there it was: the story of a man who scaled the heights of Greek and Gothic under Leonard Palmer and C.L.Wrenn, and then plumbed the depths translating inter alia EU stuff, the latter only because he was lonely.

bq. He could have aspired to a professorial chair [what other kind, indeed?] – after all, he had even written on word formation in Gothic, an extinct language [who knew?], mastery of which was once deemed essential to academic preferment in London [perhaps not in all fields] – but instead, to the amazement and consternation of his colleagues, he chose to retire at the age of 51. …

bq. He now wrote perspicuously on the complexities and subtleties of modern German tense usage, sensitively analysing Thomas Bernhard’s linguistically complex prose, which he was already beginning to translate. …

bq. For a time he even worked in the Civil Service, in the Department of the Environment, translating EU documentation. Dull as this sounds, he enjoyed the companionship of working in an office, for the life of a translator can be very lonely.

I wish I had not recognized the name of the author of this obituary – a name which remained hidden till the second page of the printout – as one of my own former lecturers.

In case anyone else looks at the obituary, there is an error in the use of italics: ‘His translation of Beton appeared as Concrete with Dent‘ should read ‘His translation of Beton appeared as Concrete, published by Dent’.

Someone suggested to me that this car was for sale, but I don’t think the numberplate FÜAL would have the same effect. (People are constantly asking me why I am photographing something or other, and sometimes telling me that they wouldn’t).

Transblawg has been nominated for the Deutsche Welle weblog competition mentioned earlier.

I can’t help thinking of a CD I have, called Best of the BOBs. I hope the title hasn’t been trademarked.

A touch of the Hannibal Lectors in this presentation. This jelly (Jell-O) model of a brain used a mould from the Anatomical Chart Company.

Bruce Stern, of the Traumatic Brain Injury weblog, reports on a case where a jelly mould was used, where the judge would not allow a pig’s brain to be used to demonstrate to the jury how fragile the brain is – human brains are not allowed in court anyway – oh dear, that’s not quite the right way to put it, is it? He writes ‘Purchase of a human brain is illegal’ – so you have to make do with what you’ve got.

Here’s a medical modelling site.

This is a lexBlog, set up and run for a law firm. There is an interview in the new llrx.com with Kevin O’Keeffe, who owns lexBlog, and he mentions some interesting legal blogs. Another is Arnie Herz’s legal sanity, which has some very interesting reports on finds on the Web.

LATER NOTE: I received an email from Kenneth Adams saying that the article will shortly be available on his website.

In the latest ITI Bulletin – not online – there is an article by Kenneth A. Adams, author of the US book ‘A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting’. I wasn’t going to comment on the article, which most people won’t have read, but then I did mention the book before, and a little discussion has developed in the comments there.

Kenneth Adams briefly discusses the over-complex style of legal drafting, and then his own background with regard to translation (his sister is a conference interpreter, and when he worked for a US law firm in Geneva, he occasionally translated legal prose – ‘always French-to-English, thankfully’ – not only thankfully, but naturally).

The subject of the article is translating English contracts into other languages. Adams writes:

bq. I would imagine that the principal problem facing a translator is that many elements of a contract are included not because of the meaning they convey, but because they’ve always been there and the drafter feels that the contract somehow wouldn’t look right without them.

He refers to petrified elements such as witnesseth, or Now, therefore. Actually, these aren’t such a big problem, once you’ve decided once how to handle them.

He discusses the use of shall, and when must, will or the present tense should be used, and also, and this is useful, provided that. The latter should not really be used in contracts, because of its imprecision, but it will be used, and will have to be translated, nevertheless.

The last topic is synonym strings. Here is the greatest problem in translating out of English. Sometimes a doublet or triplet consists of synonyms, sometimes not, and unless it’s obvious, probably all terms need to be translated, but it isn’t usually possible to find out the exact meanings in English, not even from the lawyer who drafted the contract.

Back to the discussion in my comments on the earlier entry: take an expression like ‘NOW, THEREFORE, in consideration of the premises and the mutual covenants set forth herein and for other good and valuable consideration…’. Adams says ‘in consideration of these premises’ is odd, since the ‘now, therefore’ section, which he calls the ‘recitals of consideration’, is required for the agreement to be enforceable, but ‘these premises’, i.e. the above recitals (names and addresses of parties, the fact that one owns an item and the other wants to buy it) do not constitution consideration. I agree with him, but I think a standardized translation will do the job.

AMM thinks ‘these premises’ means ‘this contract’, whereas I think it means ‘the recitals above’. It’s possible to find support for my opinion, but not much. Google suggests in any case that the term is US and not British (do a search on site:uk). Books on contract drafting suggest that the whole consideration section can be omitted, since it adds nothing. Of course there must be consideration (Gegenleistung, often money), but it need not be the actual value. Mellinkoff, in ‘Legal Writing: Sense & Nonsense’, says that the consideration boilerplate goes back to a time when parties were disqualified from testifying, and the writing could ‘testify’ for them. Garner, in ‘A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage’, writes:

bq. The word premises is sometimes used in the sense of matters (usu. preliminary facts of statements) previously referred to in the same instrument. In practice, this usage is often inarticulate and confusing, since the subject matter constituting the premises is rarely specified in the instrument.

Here’s the example given by AMM in the comments to my earlier entry:

bq. ‘WHEREFORE, in consideration of *these* premises, and for *other* good and valuable consideration the sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged, the parties agree …
www.dot.tk/pdf/rncs.pdf

I’ve heard of to as a domain, but not tk, so I looked it up, and it’s Tokelau, apparently three atolls somewhere off New Zealand.