The German Federal Ministry of Justice has published a PDF file containing the draft of a statute to modernize Costs Law (in German; on 28th August, entitled ‘Einfach, transparent und zeitgemäß’). With regard to translators and interpreters, it says that the principle of ‘compensation’ is to be replaced by ‘payment’ (translators and interpreters for the courts have till now been regarded as being ‘compensated’ for the time they have lost, rather than paid for work done). There is to be a new statute for translators, interpreters, expert witnesses and lay judges (ehrenamtliche Richter). There are to be clearly defined payment groups with fixed hourly rates, which are to be more closely approximated to free market rates (hmm, that will give them a wide field!). It sounds as if the range of rates is to be narrower, thus avoiding some of the customary disputes. Refer to ‘Zu § 11’ on p. 225 for more details (thanks to Chico Moreira).

Payment per line is to give way to payment for a number of keystrokes, that is, it is recognized that translations are done on computers and computers can make it easier to count text. And here it comes:

bq. Maßeinheit für die Vergütung soll die im Bereich des Übersetzerwesens
allgemein eingeführte Standardzeile sein, die sich aus 55 Anschlägen einschließlich der Leerzeichen zusammensetzt. Zwar vertritt die ganz herrschende Auffassung in Rechtsprechung und Kommentarliteratur die Meinung, Leerzeichen seien keine Schriftzeichen im Sinne des § 17 Abs. 4
ZuSEG, weil sie nicht der Kommunikation dienten und damit auch keine Übersetzungsleistung erforderten. Wegen der weitverbreiteten Akzeptanz der Standardzeile erscheint es jedoch angebracht, diesen Umrechnungsmaßstab aufzugreifen.

bq. The unit by which payment is measured is to be the standard line, which is generally recognized among translators, consisting of 55 characters, including spaces. The overwhelmingly prevailing opinion in case law [how many court cases have there been?] and in the commentaries takes the view that spaces are not characters in the meaning of section 17 (4) of the ZuSEG (Gesetz über die Entschädigung von Zeugen und Sachverständigen, Act on the Reimbursement of Witnesses and Expert Witnesses) because they do not serve communication [have these people tried written communication without spaces?] and therefore require no work on the part of the translator. However, in view of the widespread acceptance of the standard line, it appears appropriate to use this measure. [How condescending!]

However, if the translator or the costs clerk lacks the technology for this highly modern form of counting, counting by lines will still be possible in certain circumstances.

I’ve just finished reading Bernhard Schlink’s Die gordische Schleife (literally ‘the Gordian bow’, referring to the idea that every Gordian knot can be untied), a thriller that appeared in 1988. It reads well, especially at the beginning, but its plot and the relationships between its characters are not very credible, and at the end it suddenly gets tied up in unexpected philosophizing. Schlink’s strongest suit seems to be observation of the world through the eyes of a reflective young man – thoughtful observation of detail is the strongest element of Der Vorleser too.

Before I bought it, Schlink had written two better-thought-of crime novels whose main character, Selb, was a 68-year-old private detective with a Nazi past. A further one, Selbs Mord (literally, Selb’s murder: SelbsTmord means suicide) appeared in 2001. But Schlink is now internationally famous as the author of Der Vorleser (The Reader) (not just because it was an Oprah selection in the USA). But The Gordian Knot (as it will be called when it appears in English in 2004) has a main character who is a German ex-lawyer turned translator, living in France. Continue reading →

Lex Scripta is an Australian law portal (Essential Web Links for Queensland Lawyers). It’s the link of the week at the University of Saarbrücken (German). Lex Scripta contains a large number of links of wide interest. It’s opening page includes a Google search of AustLII (I did a quick search on ‘kangaroo’ and got 1085 hits, but I admit this was superficial of me). The site describes itself as follows:

bq. Lex Scripta, as the name implies, is intended primarily as a guide to finding Leges Scriptæ – written legal reference resources – wherever they exist on the Internet. But it is much more than a catalogue or index of legal reference sites. Through the links found on this site, practising members of the legal profession, as well as legal academics and students, should be able to locate any web-based resource likely to be useful in the course of their daily work.

and it says it is of interest to laypersons as well as to lawyers.

Perhaps it bears repeating that AustLII is the Australasian Legal Information Institute, a first-class portal for Australian and New Zealand law that aims to link all freely available statute and case law and has been copied, but not bettered, by BAILII (Britain and Ireland), CanLII (Canada), HKLII (Hong Kong), PacLII (Pacific Islands) and WorldLII (the world).

I was reading in the LISA newsletter about a form of translation memory software that is not tied to the sentence but instead to large paragraphs and that creates a big index of all elements of a text.

The article is by Timothy Hunt of TermSeek Inc. and actually comes from the archives but I haven’t seen it before.
The software called translation support software and two kinds being worked on are TransSearch and Translator’s Intuition:

bq. For example, Elliott Macklovitch and Graham Russell in What’s been Forgotten in Translation Memory pointed out that statistical based TM systems would say that sentence (1) below is closest to sentence (2) even though sentence (3) is closer in meaning.

bq. The wild child is destroying his new toy.
The wild chief is destroying his new tool.
The wild children are destroying their new toy.

Further web searching led to a useful page on software for translators by il8nguy, whose site I’ve seen before but also not done justice to. il8n is short for ‘international localization’.

There is also a list of language and translation blogs (under the subdirectory ‘humor’).

In today’s Nürnberger Nachrichten, in the Stadt Nürnberg section (also to be found in the Fürther Nachrichten, of course), there is an interview (in German) with Francisco Ludovice-Moreira, the President of the Bavarian section of the Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer/BDÜ, the professional association for translators and interpreters in Germany (there are others, such as ADÜ-Nord and ATICOM, and VdÜ (the last one is for literary translators). Like many German newspaper interviews, it is printed like the script of a play, with the names of the speakers and their texts. I have no idea whether such an interview is unaltered.

The main topic is interpreting for the police and courts. The police are said to be happy, often, to use a student for 15 euros per hour, and they have no interest as to whether a translator is sworn or not. There is also reference to the fact that translator and interpreter certification is a matter of Land law and should be standardized throughout Germany, and some discussion of the variation of payment for translations from court to court. The current statute, the ZSEG or ZuSEG, is soon to be replaced by the JVEG, and that may lay down a fixed line price and hourly rate.

There was a little discussion on CompuServe (FLEFO) as to why it is worth saving dying languages (a subject I rarely think about). Tony Roder, of the Translator’s Home Companion, mentioned reading a favourable review of a book on the subject. The book is Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, by Mark Abley, a Canadian journalist said to be a good story-teller, who travelled around the world investigating obscure and less obscure languages. Lawyers might find it difficult to speak Boro, a language in Northern India with scarcely any nouns. I see languagehat has already mentioned it, but I was in Verona at the time (he mentions an Amazonian language that was last spoken by a parrot, which was surely in a Larson cartoon).