The dispensing chemist’s / pharmacy, the Apotheke, is very evident in the German urban landscape. This is the one nearest my flat. Alas, no polarizing filter! At the left, deep vein thrombosis on long-haul flights; at the right, knee joints; in the centre, ticks, with a map showing where they are most common. We have few ticks in the centre of Fürth (although if the greening continues the situation might change). I am particularly worried about the gigantic folding paper ticks. Here is a link to a picture showing you how to remove a tick from your pet snake (text German).

Noel Castelino reminded me of World Wide Words, subtitled ‘Michael Quinion writes about international English from a British viewpoint’.

bq. This site is all about English words and phrases—what they mean, where they came from, how they have evolved, and sometimes the ways in which people misuse them.

It now has over 1350 pages, including some on the latest entries, on weird words, book reviews and an excellent set of links to other language sites.

There is a good summary of the 1999 Civil Procedure Rules changes to legal language, about which many English>German translators are still not informed. I must say, though, that I prefer to use plaintiff to translate Kläger unless I know the client wants claimant.

While I’m on the subject: I’ve mentioned Word Spy, a site about new English words, before, but it didn’t get a separate entry.

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.