The ABA Journal has an article on the legal issues relating to the crash of the Columbia.

First, there is a doctrine in U.S. law of posse comitatus (‘to be able to be an attendant’ according to Gifis’ Law Dictionary, aka Barron’s Law Dictionary – the mass market edition is cheaper and the content identical), which (says the ABA Journal) forbids the military from enforcing civilian law, so no soldiers around when people were arrested for stealing debris.

Then, had the material been hazardous, jurisdiction problems would have been considerable.

Finally, there is the question of damages for the next of kin. Their chances are slight, as it appears government immunity will apply. Government immunity (or sovereign immunity) has a long tradition, taken over from the English rule, ‘The King can do no wrong’, and applied to the president and government of the USA.

Via languagehat, originally from wood s lot,
a collection of 19th-century German stories etc. (at Virginia Commonwealth University). For example, you can have a dual-language version of Max und Moritz onscreen, but since the translation is rhyming and not interlinear, it won’t help learners understand the German. However, you can show the German with glossary and dictionary, so you can click on any word for a translation.

Via beSpacific: an article in the International Herald Tribune on the free audio files available at www.oyez.org. The files are being converted by Jerry Goldman, a professor of political science at Northwestern University. There’s an interview with Goldman at the OYEZ site.

I’ve now managed to get through to the List of Topics page in English in Jurawiki.

The following is not supposed to be a complete rejection of the translated pages – I am just interested in what might go wrong. A lot of running text sounds funny but is partly comprehensible. It is also striking that the link words, being visible through colour and/or underlining, make the structure of the page clearer.

Large parts are intelligible, but it seems to me there are intrinsic problems in using a translation service that you can’t customize yourself. A lot of terms of art should be left in German, perhaps with an English equivalent. Even if that can’t be done, a customizable service should allow you to enter equivalents for important words (but maybe the MT service is customizable after all).

Some terminology problems:

|Rechtsgebiete|Right areas|
|BGBAllgemeiner Teil|BGBAllgemeiner Teil|
|Grundrechte|Fundamental righte|
|Erbrecht|Vomit|
|Doktorarbeit|Doctor work|

It seems a good idea to make a rough translation available, and probably the effort needed to remove these problems would be disproportionate in time and expense. Google results are identical, but not available at the touch of a button, and not in so many languages.

From Handakte WebLAWg: MT in Jurawiki.
There is a German law Wiki, Jurawiki, mentioned here before. It offers machine translation into English, Chinese (traditional and simplified characters), Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
The translation is still in its early stages, however. I would be curious to know how well this works for users of other languages, although I’m not sure how much demand there would be.
Presumably the databases can be filled with the appropriate vocabulary, or the MT system can be told to choose legal terminology, which should help most of the time.

Rechtspfleger (a sort of sub-judge) comes out as Right Male Nurse. This should be avoidable in the long term, if an entry is made for Rechtspfleger – this will then be given priority over Recht + Pfleger. (Krankenpfleger is a male nurse, Recht is either law or right, a difficult distinction for MT programs).

As is confirmed by a comment by Ralf Zosel in Handakte WebLAWg, the system they are trying is www.worldlingo.com. A cursory glance shows some involvement of Systran, a system used to some extent by the EU. I am absolutely not an expert on this, but I remember Pete Jones in the EU in Brussels saying if a letter comes in in German, he has a choice between an immediate MT translation or waiting for two weeks for a human translation. I think that is Systran, which has always had a good reputation and is said to be making some language pairs available to Worldlingo. Continue reading →

The new Chicago Manual of Style is out. Isabella Massardo – Tacuino di Traduzione (Translation Notebook) – links to a review in the New York Times (free subscription required).

Many questions and answers about writing English on the CSM website. They also have a description of the fifteenth edition, including details of what’s new. And there is a facsimile of the first edition (1906) you can download as a PDF file.

And here are some links from Purdue University (not checked) on citing electronic publications.