On 13th January, The Times published the ethical dilemma of a public service interpreter:

bq. I am a self-employed as a public-service interpreter and occasionally I
have to translate a statement that both the speaker and I know is a lie. I
know that I am employed as a machine into which you pour one language and
out of which you get another, but I am uncomfortable with this situation. I
could, of course, cover myself by reporting the lie to a superior officer,
but I may then find that very little work is coming my way. Any
suggestions?

The Ethicist’s answer is only available to paying subscribers. You can have a one-week subscription, but I haven’t.

He says she has to tell the truth, even if she is just hired as a kind of machine.
If she is not certain it is a lie, she can translate it. Lawyers may doubt a client’s innocence but still argue that the client is not guilty, but lawyers are not allowed to lie. This may cost her some work.

It’s easy to answer questions if you know you have to be ethical! I would have said she can lie if it’s a trivial matter. I also wonder if ‘lying’ is really a problem in practice. Normally the interpreter will have no idea about a lie. Interpreters probably have more qualms about opinions and manners. It looks like a query invented for the ‘ethicist’ to me.

The Times law section on 13th January had a timely article by Iain Harris on annulling marriage, saying the Britney Spears annulment was a rare case.

bq. Nullity is extremely rare. In 2002 just 197 marriages ended with a decree of nullity, compared with 147,538 that ended in a decree of divorce. Over the past 30 years as solicitor in family law, I have dealt with only a handful of nullity cases.

Britney Spears is reported to have been granted an annulment on the grounds that she ‘lacked the understanding of her actions’ (she was apparently drunk). Harris says the English equivalent would be lack of valid consent as a result of duress, mistake, unsoundness of mind or otherwise.

Mind you, if you look at the decree itself, the text goes on to speak about not knowing each other well enough, which is a somewhat different argument.

In English law, there are void marriages, as the article says (void from the beginning) and voidable marriages (they can be annulled but need not be).

In Germany there used to be three possibilities: Nichtehe, Ehenichtigkeit and Eheaufhebung, but it looks as if Ehenichtigkeit was abolished in 1998.

Following discussions in mailing lists and elsewhere, I see the BDÜ, the German Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer, has some useful information on its website – in German, and for those in Germany.
At www.bdue.de click on Aktuelles, or try this link.

The materials include a file on the changes that need to be made to translators’ invoices this year in Germany. For example, I can’t send an invoice as a PDF file because it hasn’t got the legally required electronic signature, for which apparently you need special hardware. Similarly, I shouldn’t receive such invoices (does that just affect set-off against VAT, or set-off against income tax too? Because I have some U.S. and Scandinavian software, especially for the Internet, where I have only the printout of an email and my credit card statement as evidence of purchase).

There’s also a copy of a short article Corinna Schlüter-Ellner wrote for the Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, 15 December 2003 edition. On that occasion, there was a special advertising section for translators. They even contacted me and also phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to put an ad in. I didn’t want to, because I had so much work at the time that if a new client had phoned up, I’d have had to turn them down. That is negative advertising in my view. The person on the phone told me I could farm work out, i.e. he suggested I should change the nature of my business, but I couldn’t quite see the sense of that, except for him. Corinna’s article stresses the need for a legal translator to have a training in law as well as language (many of the ads that appeared do not show evidence of this!)

The BDÜ office must be busy, because since I looked at the site this morning, files have been added on ISO 639 language codes (en, de and so on) and there is also the association’s reaction to the draft JVEG (see my earlier entry).

LATER NOTE: In the comments, Paul Thomas points out that Adobe Acrobat 6.0 does ‘sign’ documents. I am still not sure what the German tax offices will accept. A Google search indicates people offering for sale plug-ins for Acrobat that can be used together with a card and card reader to create a ‘qualifizierte elektronische Signatur’, but then again, the statute says proved ‘for example’ by this kind of signature. I will report in a new entry when I get a clearer idea.

Here’s a site for the U.S. military on how to get married in Germany, Denmark and Switzerland. I presume it dates back to the times when more Americans were here. I remember the Danes offered a weekend marriage package, included in which I believe were translations at lower cost than in Germany. (I’m not sure where Switzerland fits in – oh, I see, U.S. NATO personnel in Basel, as they call it). The materials include the apostille text.

According to BBC news, ‘British trucker wins appeal’. Pardon? Well, the story itself does return to British vocabulary:

bq. A lorry driver who faced 11 years in jail for smuggling illegal immigrants into Greece has won his appeal.

It reminds me of a letter to the Times when British Airways was given its name (what was it called before?). I think it went something like:

bq. Sir,
British Airways?

Harald Shipman has committed suicide in prison (so did Fred West). Here is a BBC profile. He had 15 (concurrent) life sentences for murder, but he is thought to have murdered more like 215 people.

LATER NOTE: I think the German TV news report I saw (ARD) got it wrong in saying ‘mehrere lebenslängliche Freiheitsstrafen’ (several terms of life imprisonment), because that sounds like the U.S. system of consecutive life sentences. Under the English system, the sentences are concurrent; the more there are, the less likely the defendant is to get out of prison early.