Udo recently posted a lovely piece of German correspondence:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren!
In der vorstehenden Sache erhalten Sie unter Bezugnahme auf Ihr Schreiben vom 2. April 2004 anliegend eine Ablichtung der in dieser Sache ergangenen Schlusskostenrechnung zur gefl. Kenntnisnahme übersandt.
Mit vorzüglicher Hochachtung
W. Justizamtsinspektor

(Dear Sir or Madam,
With reference to your letter of 2 April 2004 in the above matter, please find attached a photocopy of the final bill of costs in this matter for your esteemed attention.
Your humble servant
W. Justizamtsinspektor)

I occasionally have to translate this sort of thing. The biggest problem is understanding it. The comments are fun too. The entry is headed gepflegt, but I don’t think zur gefl. Kenntnisnahme means gepflegt. I thought it was geflissentlich, but some commenters think it is gefällig (in one case this is based on the strange claim that there is a P in geflissentlich). Nor do I think Udo thinks it means gepflegt – his title refers to a refined or cultured way of expressing oneself, and seems to be somewhat ironic. Some commenters didn’t even know the word Ablichtung for copy – it’s more common than they think!

Google doesn’t help much. The very large Duden großes Wörterbuch der dt. Sprache has often helped me with Amtsdeutsch. On geflissentlich it has

(Amtsdt. veraltet) freundlich, gefällig (bes. in der Fügung): zur gefälligen Kenntnisnahme

For gefällig it mentions the abbreviation gefl., though.

I see I’m repeating myself so refer to an earlier entry on Juristendeutsch and to an Amtsdeutsch site in Austria. A lot of it consists just of legal terms, but here for example:

hieramts
Der Begriff “hieramts” ist gleichbedeutend mit beim/im Amt.

The same site also has a copy of Thaddäus Troll’s Rotkäppchen auf Amtsdeutsch.

LRRX.Com’s May 24th page includes updated online legal information for Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

LLRX has a huge amount of information about law all over the world online, even though it is not usually updated now (see links at left).

The latest offers include an article on trends in blog searching and a review of the PalmOne Zire 7.2 PDA, with links to Palm resources for lawyers that are worth pursuing.

One blog searching site mentioned is Waypath. Among other things you can do a text search of blogs. It didn’t react to kronprinsfred or kronprinsfleep, so I don’t think it has Desbladet in there. Nor did it have my Fürth blog. It was very informative about the Blogwalk that is happening near here tomorrow and I at last understood it is a day-long meeting for academics from all over the place, by invitation. Not that I would have had time, but if there were famous bloggers walking about Nuremberg (the name Blogwalk seemed to suggest that), I would have felt it my duty to photograph them.

Derek Thornton (former blog here) reports in the FLEFO forum of CompuServe (click on Nachrichten, then English/ESL/EFL):

As the French Ambassador to the United Nations said in English today in New York on the subject of a prime minister for Iraq:
“We are not going to speculate on a Mr. ‘icks or a Mr. E. Greck.”

On language log, Sally Thomason asks what pattern governs the following list of mammals found on a farm in north-eastern Oregon:

bq. Mammal sightings: black bear, bobcat, cougar, white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, chipmunk, ground squirrel, flying squirrel, snowshoe hare, mice, and vole

As she says, animals you hunt often take no plural -S, e.g. a brace of duck. But you wouldn’t talk about shooting a brace of vole (Wühlmäuse), although I imagine they’re difficult to hit.

bq. What’s interesting is the zero-plural-for-game-animals usage in this list, except for those mice — which aren’t game animals, of course, but then, neither are voles and chipmunks. That is, as is typical in discussions of game animals, all the terms are treated as if they were structurally parallel to deer, with plural identical to singular. Surely those animal sightings are multiple, not a single member of each species (well, except maybe for rarely-seen animals like cougars).

I think the idea is: if I’ve seen one, that’s sufficient. The lister is not interested in how many chipmunks he saw, just that he saw a chipmunk (is it the generic ‘the chipmunk’) at all. Still, I would be happier with ‘chipmunks’ and ‘voles’, but of course as it’s not a text about hunting, the bears should be plural too. Perhaps the writer was avoiding -s plurals for some reason or other and then the mice did not seem to break the pattern either, so voles and chipmunks remained singular too. Was it not Tom, of Tom and Jerry, who said, ‘I hate those meeses to pieces’? (In this connection, I have been translating something about Azerbaijan and see that you can shoot a lot of ducks there).

Anyway, I can’t post this as a comment on language log, because it allows no comments. An apologia for this has just been posted by Geoffrey Pullum. Actually, I would have thought it safe to allow comments provided you close posting of comments after a certain date. I get scarcely any comments since I closed posting on old posts. I still have a good six weeks open (this is a guess). There is one persistent poster, presumably automatic, who is constantly turned away by MT Blacklist. But that I could delete myself on the recent posts if I had to.

Wordlab has an article on law firm names, with many links.

It cites a law.com article, and lists long names and spoof names. Dewey Cheatham and Howe even has a website.

Private Eye used to mention a firm called Sue Grabbit & Runne. There must be others.

I heard my name mentioned on Blogalization, where iggy has been discussing the difficulty of translating the term ‘creative commons’ into Spanish, quoting this note from the Spanish translator of a Cory Doctorow essay on E-Books:

bq. This text originally dealt with what in North American law is called the “public domain,” the place where texts whose copyrights have expired end up. The meaning of “dominio público” in Spanish law, however, which follows the European tradition of authorial rights, is different from that of “public domain” …

iggy wonders:

bq. Is the notion of the “creative commons” Anglocentric? Does it presuppose the framework of the English common law, and is it translatable into the terms of other legals systems (such as Brazil’s Roman and Napoleonic legal system)? How do such questions affect the ongoing project for the international commons, which aims to “port” the Creative Commons license in collaboration with local initiatives such as International Commons Spain and International Commons Brazil?

This is quite clearly a question for Professor Lenz, who teaches German law in Japan and has weblogs in English, German and Japanese, and who is my authority for us being cautious about creative commons.

I don’t know this area. But this is my feeling: it isn’t a common law / civil law question, for all the term ‘commons’ is used (I’ve already pointed out today that there are several meanings of ‘common law’, and here’s another term). Well, it is, but not because the difference between the copyright systems is rooted in the two legal systems and could never be changed. But there is a difference in that I think you can’t 100% give your copyright away in German law – that’s what they mean by ‘authorial’. I don’t even know what the situation is in England; hasn’t it changed in that direction too (asserting one’s ‘moral rights’, for instance). Anyway, that doesn’t really matter, because you can still give the rights of use, give as much as you can. If you call it creative commons, it just won’t go quite as far as it would in the USA (is that correct, experts?). The problem was that under creative commons you remained liable for throughput. Professor Lenz highlighted

I see there are new creative commons licences out today (2.0), incidentally.

But the main point of this late – or early – post is to publicize the translation question.