Loveparade Duisburg: criminal investigation falls into the hands of translators

Posted on by
Reply

There’s an article in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) on the holdups to the Loveparade case resulting from delayed or erroneous translations by two agencies: Das Loveparade-Verfahren überfordert Englisch-Übersetzer.

21 people died from asphyxiation and 541 were injured at the Loveparade 2010 in Duisburg. It seems that the ground was suitable for 250,000 people and didn’t even reach capacity before there was a crush at the entrance between those coming in and those trying to leave. (Wikipedia German, Wikipedia English).

Apparently it is still not clear exactly how the accident occurred. The court commissioned a report from Professor G. Keith Still, Professor of Crowd Science at Manchester Metropolitan University, presumably to throw light on the sequence of events. This choice of expert witness was criticized as all the documents had to be translated into English for Professor Still and his report had to be translated back into German.

Criticism was directed at the delays in translation by the first agency, and also errors in the translation by the second agency. The second agency was commissioned in June 2012. On Friday November 14, Joachim Schwartz, the presiding judge of the 5th Duisburg Strafkammer, sent out three pages of criticism of errors.

What happened in detail in the translations?

1. We don’t know when the first agency was commissioned, just that June 2012 was regarded as too late. The events took place in June 2010, and after that the documents had to be translated and sent to Professor Still and he had to write his report before any translation could be commissioned.

The article states that the public prosecutors were sometimes unsatisfied with the time they had to wait for translations, and that deadlines were repeatedly breached. This suggests that the first agency was responsible for more than one translation – perhaps the DE>EN ones as well as the EN>DE one.

The report is available online as a PDF (21 pages, contains illustrations and photos). However, there was a later extended report, dated March 2013. This second report can be downloaded from the WAZ site here in four parts.

2. On November 14 the court, as stated above, criticized the second agency’s translation. The public prosecutor’s office is waiting to give the agency a chance to respond.

One part criticized is this (from the second report):

When did the loudspeaker system cease to be effective?

Original, referring to loudspeakers: “Their deployment and use is to inform the crowds but once the entry system failed and the crowds flowed in behind the police lines the situation was already beyond the point of no return.”

Translation: “Deren Verwendung und Einsatz dient der Information der Menschenmenge, aber sobald das Eingangssystem versagte, und die Menschenmenge bis zu den Polizeikordonen geströmt war, hatte die Situation einen Punkt überschritten, wo keine Rückkehr mehr möglich war.”

The translation treats “behind the police lines” as “up to the police lines”. I presume this is important because of the allocation of responsibility.

The court also criticized that the translation was in parts dubious, in parts changed the meaning, and in one place had omitted a complete sentence.

There isn’t enough evidence here to demonstrate a really bad translation. On top of that, the report itself is controversial and much criticized by the defence.

There’s a useful German blog on Loveparade 2010:
Dokumentation der Ereignisse der Loveparade 2010 in Duisburg

Unterlassungsgläubiger

Posted on by
2

I was wondering what to do with Unterlassungsgläubiger in the case of a declaration of discontinuance. If it had been Unterlassungsschuldner, I could have used declarant, and I was tending here to the other party. But as usual I wondered what others had done.

Someone on Linguee had gone for ‘the party asserting the demand for restraint’, which is correct if nothing else.

There was no ProZ discussion but one on LEO looking for both terms. Someone there suggested respondent and claimant and seemed unfamiliar with German legal terminology:

Da formuliert der Herr Anwalt schon sehr tendenziös. Er stempelt ohne jedes Gerichtsurteil jemanden für alle Zukunft (“zukünftig”) als “Schuldner” ab, obwohl jemand, der etwas unterlassen soll, per definitionem niemandem etwas schuldet. Wahrscheinlich ist die Erklärung gar nicht so lange, dass man die Firmenbezeichnungen immer wieder in Kurzform wiederholen müsste.

Sometimes obligor works for Schuldner, the normal term for a who owes a duty under civil law, but often it isn’t natural English and that depends on the purpose of the text.

There was also a link to a list of terminology on a 2003 translator’s blog:

You might find this link useful:

http://thornton.log.ag/

Scroll down to The section Wettbewerbsrecht Terminolgie I
HTH

Goodness me! that takes me back to CompuServe again – I recognize the technical translator’s name and location. I take the liberty of quoting a whole post from this presumably defunct blog:

Competition Law
Terminology I

In the short time that I have been busying myself with “Disclaimers” and “Cease-and-Desist orders”, I have come across a number of terms that, although I had no difficulty in understanding what they meant (at least well enough for a non-lawyer to get an idea of what it was all about, that is), nevertheless, I really had no idea of the accepted equivalents in British or American English (they are very likely not to be the same).

This is typical of what can happen to a technical translator from time to time. He/she gets the job of translating some boring machine manual, takes a quick look through before accepting but fails to notice that the customer has slipped in a few passages that are well outside his/her own area of expertise and there is nothing to be done about it but try to get help from somebody with an idea on the subject.

It took me well over my self-allotted 30 minutes weblog time today just to put the list together. I estimate that tracking down acceptable equivalents will take at least ten or twenty times as long! I am beginning to get a feeling that for a spare-time blogger, one or two terms per day would be quite enough to track down and document! In normal translation work, of course, while it is usual to make up a terminology list, it is not usual to do it in public! I am going to see what kind of a mess I can make of this. (It is now 2 a.m. again!)

Reading Proust in the original

Posted on by
Reply

It looks as if this may be a good French version for the Kindle.

The ‘most helpful’ negative review on amazon:

0 of 13 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Can’t read French
I ordered this edition by error. I couldn’t trace the English version. That will teach me to look at the description more closely.
Published 17 months ago by Leonard K

Germany: Memories of a Nation

Posted on by
1

1280px-Johann_Heinrich_Wilhelm_Tischbein_007
(Goethe before liposuction)

I managed to see the British Museum exhibition, subtitled A History in 600 Objects, on Thursday. The accompanying radio series (I’ve only listened to one of the 15-minute episodes, now distracted by The Serial podcast) and book (has just appeared, also for Kindle) contain more detail.

The Telegraph two-star review I can understand.

MacGregor studied German at Oxford, has a lifelong passion for German history and culture, and a keen sense of their role in what makes Europe tick. These are important matters, more than worthy of greater attention, and MacGregor’s commitment shines through in the radio series, which clearly announces itself as a personal view. In the exhibition, however, this sense of identification coupled with MacGregor’s weighty professional role lends the show an oddly official air, as though it were being bankrolled by the Goethe Institute. While there’s no evidence of any such involvement parts of the show have the worthily dated air of expo exhibition stands.

The whole thing is idiosyncratic. It purports to relate to the reunified Germany which has only existed for 25 years, but it goes back hundreds of years and emphasizes the earlier larger Germany (Basel, Strasbourg, Kaliningrad; nice historical political maps) and there plenty of Luther, Holbein, Dürer, some nice Riemenschneider apostles too, in so far as a manageable exhibition with such a broad sweep can get anywhere. I didn’t so much feel there was too much text as that I didn’t feel I’d come to an exhibition with this title to read about Goethe’s Farbenlehre or the development of Meissen porcelain. I’m also not sure what ‘memories of a nation’ is supposed to mean.

It wasn’t necessary to book, and there were not too many problems of the present ubiquitous barrier of headphone wearers following the audio guide.

Some things were new to me or particularly struck me.

The model of Friedrichstrasse station created to train Stasi officials (picture in the book too). We used to cross there in 1967-1968, and a friend of mine was subjected to a body search and turned up on the East Berlin side with twenty minutes’ delay. I had no idea how it was constructed then, and looking at the model doesn’t help much now. Dr. Sabine Beneke of the Deutsches Historisches Museum is quoted (this is a building when another English friend and I were almost mown down in 1967 because we failed to see the goose-stepping soldiers patrolling in front of it):

‘I made the journey from West to East Berlin several times. … You can see clearly on the model that the station was constructed in a deliberately complex way. The spaces are divided up by very tall walls to give the effect of a labyrinth. There was no clear orientation. You can see the different train tracks were completely separated, so tracks which operated within the East German side were kept separate from those which ran through to the West German side or beyond. As you moved from the train to the exit, you kept having to change direction and change level. You went into small doors and then large spaces, then small spaces, and everyhwere in the model you can see the high windows in which observation agents or cameras were placed.’

I didn’t realize the lettering on the Buchenwald gate, which I’ve seen in situ (combines well with a trip to Weimar) was Bauhaus style.

Mutter Courage’s handcart, which I’d forgotten about – the Leiterwagen is perhaps typically German, and I used one to move house in the same road in 1984.

Barlach’s angel – I didn’t realize the original was melted down as entartete Kunst in the Third Reich.

I wasn’t aware that the only triumphant leader who marched through the Brandenburg Gate was Napoleon.

There is masses of material touched on in the exhibition: the Grimms, Caspar David Friedrich, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, the tradition of crafts and trades – but all these things are more the material for a book. The book is huge and richly illustrated and worth getting hold of.

Daumen drücken

Posted on by
3

“Cross your fingers, or press your thumbs if you are a German, that we hear something from the lander again,” Valentina Lommatsch of the Rosetta mission control centre in Germany.

I haven’t been able to establish whether she is German by origin. The name Valentina is not common in Germany. The pressing of thumbs caused surprise in some quarters:

The Germans are weird in other ways. According to Inglorious Basterds if asked to hold up three fingers, they use thumb and next two fingers. Hollywood wouldn’t lie to us would they???

theGermanStandard is a blog by Kathrin, a teacher of German in London which explains this kind of thing. If crossing your fingers doesn’t help, try pressing your thumbs has a picture too. The gesture seems to go back to gladiator fights in ancient Rome.

As Johnson noted, crossing your fingers suggests you are hoping to avoid the worst, whereas Daumen drücken is about hoping for success.

I was excited to read the tweets from Philae Lander, in view of the fact that tweeting hadn’t been invented when it set off:

.@ESA_Rosetta I’m feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap… #CometLanding

But maybe they are further evidence of alien activity on the comet:

According to an email published on the website UFOSightingsDaily.com – which does a regular trade in alien sightings – this mission is part of a European Space Agency and Nasa cover-up to disguise the comet’s true alien nature.