Good news from Robin Bonthrone, of Fry and Bonthrone:

The EU has adopted some of the International Accounting Standards (but not yet IAS 32, IAS 39 and related interpretation (SICs).

The text is available online: English version / German version.

You have to click on the little ‘1’ to get a PDF file of the Official Journal.

The texts are available in the other 9 official languages too (click on abbreviation at top of page).

This is great news, as the easiest way to get them so far has been as thick books often updated.

See also Robin Bonthrone’s article on German Financial Accounting translation in the Translation Journal.

Since the September 11th attacks, there has been a lot of talk about the U.S. not having enough translators and interpreters for Arabic and other ‘terrorist’ languages, and now this is in the news in connection with Guantanamo Bay, familiarly known as Gitmo (16 languages).

In this connection, the American Translators Association (ATA) has had national U.S. TV appearances by its PR co-Chair Kevin Hendzel (of ASET).

These can be seen online or downloaded via the ATA website (streaming audio and video).

This is an endless topic. I discussed it here and here, and ‘district court’ as a term here, and a similar question arose with Austrian court names here.

Alexander Hartmann has now given a reference to the list of translations suggested by the Auswärtiges Amt on the Triacom site. They are in Per Döhler’s archive there. For a long time that was the only place they could be found on the web, although when I came to mention them in the first entry, I couldn’t find them in the archive, but that was obviously my mistake.

Hartmann writes:

bq. allemal nützlich für international tätige Juristen und alle diejenigen, die gerne mal über den Tellerrand der nationalen Rechtsordnung hinausblicken

(certainly useful for lawyers with an international practice and everyone who enjoys looking at the world outside the confines of the German legal system)

Since the translations were created in Germany, this statement is a little mysterious.

Hartmann was quoted by Walter Simon, who writes a German legal weblog with summaries in English. We had quite a discussion in the comments boxes (in German), once I had made the effort to register (I have one effective and one ineffective sign-in name with antville – it drives me mad registering there, but I suppose this deters comment spammers).

It’s striking that Walter Simon found the names unfamiliar. One wonders what the Auswärtiges Amt is doing. The list dates from 1974 and it isn’t that well known. I got a copy when I was sworn as a translator.

I don’t regard myself as obliged to use those names when I translate for the courts. I have rarely been asked to translate for them, and nearly all my sworn translations, being into English, go outside Germany, to places where the names are even less well known. I wouldn’t go as far as a French colleague of mine, who says as soon as she hears that a translation into French has been prescribed by a German authority, she knows not to use it. But it is absolutely vital for the original German name of the court to be there at least once (provided the court name is of any significance to the final reader – it isn’t always).

At all events, we don’t have anything like the Netherlands Nederlandse Rechtsbegrippen Vertaald, a book containing a few hundred Netherlands legal terms and their prescribed translations into French, English and German, that comes out every few years in an expanded edition. The 1998 second edition is described as follows in the Asser Newsletter No. 1:

bq. Nederlandse Rechtsbegrippen Vertaald : Frans-Engels-Duits
Second, revised edition
Eds.: K. Boele-Woelki en F.J.A. van der Velden
Revision: J.H.M. van Erp, C.B.P. Mahé and G.J.W. Steenhoff
When translating Dutch legal texts one is regularly confronted with specific Dutch legal terms for which there is no equivalent in the target language. `Nederlandse Rechtsbegrippen Vertaald’ provides translations for such legal terms. Apart from being an indispensable tool for translators, the aim of this book is to harmonize foreign words and expressions for typical Dutch legal terms, making this a unique publication. A second, revised edition has now appeared.
(Appearing under the auspices of the Netherlands Comparative Law Association, Utrecht. Published by the T.M.C. Asser Instituut, ISBN 90-6704-104-1, paperback, 80 pp., price Dfls. 35).

Isabella Massardo links to a BBC news article on the problems of machine translation. It starts out from the story about the pulped brochure for Homberg an der Efze reported here a month ago.

The article is a reasoned explanation of why machine translation works for some purposes and not for others. It is followed by a number of comments, which tend to churn out the old chestnuts (‘out of sight, out of mind’ rendered as ‘invisible idiot’). It seems a bit difficult to think seriously about translation with this trivialization.

A Sabine Reul of Textbüro Reul translators is quoted.

I mentioned the German ‘Impressum’ again very recently. Now the German American Law Journal has taken up the topic, under the heading ‘Silly German law with extraterritorial effect’.

They mention the problem that some German lawyers have made a point of suing people who don’t observe the (letter of the) law. It’s only websites with a commercial purpose that need to give this information, and some courts have defined as commercial any website that displays advertising banners. One court condoned the pursuit of a cease and desist order when the ‘Impressum’ needed more than two mouseclicks to reach. (Indeed, when I started this blog, I was recommended to give a direct link to the ‘Impressum’ on the blog, even though I had a link to the website and that had a link to the ‘Impressum’ on it).

Of course, if this is a ‘silly law’, it isn’t a silly German law, but silly EU law. I wonder how keenly it is enforced in England. The German American law blog mentions a case where a Welsh company that operated in Germany was required to display its foreign corporate data. (Well, it’s described as a Welsh company, but of course all English and Welsh companies are registered in Cardiff). Now strictly speaking, that data should be there already, albeit in English. OK, maybe when the proceedings were instituted the Directive had not yet been transposed into English law, but the Directive must have applied in England and Wales. Here’s the Heise report and here is the case report (both in German).

It does appear that this was a company run by Germans who chose to incorporate as an English limited company to save costs.

Incidentally, the German American Law Journal refers to the ‘Impressum’ as ‘compliant statement’, which is useful (but perhaps would not be understood by everyone).

An earlier entry in the German American Law Journal discusses German cease-and-desist-order practices.