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.

The Guardian gives top marks to EuroSavant, the blog of a multilingual American living in Amsterdam who offers a personal view of the latest news stories in a number of countries, including Hungary and Poland:

bq. I’ve picked up some European languages. With this great tool of the Internet – and my UPC/Chello broadband cable hook-up – I can read the various publications put up on the Net in those languages. It’s likely that this cannot be said of hardly any of the other webloggers out there, as excellent as some of them may be.

A recent entry on Belgium has a puzzling entry on the colour names given to the Belgian government:

bq. About that new Belgian governing coalition, La Derniere Heure reports (in an article that also lists all the new ministers, for those interested) that although the new government will be headed just like the last one was by Guy Verhofstad, this new one will be the “violet” government whereas the last was called “arch-into-the-sky” (arc-en-ciel).

To be fair, the blogger was probably in Poland and the time and didn’t have a French-English dictionary to hand. (Thanks, Pete!)

The blog is very well designed, easy to navigate, with lists of all its sources (mainly online newspapers for each country). It’s an ambitious project for one person, though. Still, while he’s been travelling, he has been posting less than usual.

Europundits is a group blog.

Here is an article (for journalists) on online news in Europe, with a lot of links.

Bruce Blawer presents links to weblogs all over Western Europe, superimposed on a map (well, Iceland was better placed than the rest for me).

And yet another possibility for those wanting behind-the-scenes news from Europe would be to use a newsreader and subscribe to English-language blogs from the locals.

The ZuSEG (ZSEG), Gesetz über die Entschädigung von Zeugen und Sachverständigen (Act on the Reimbursement of Witnesses and Expert Witnesses) – a new Act , the JVEG, is intended to replace it. There is a lot to be said about how much courts pay, but at the moment I’m just writing about how they count texts.

bq. § 17 Dolmetscher und Übersetzer
(1) Für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer gelten die Vorschriften dieses Gesetzes sinngemäß.
(2) Für ihre Leistungen werden Dolmetscher wie Sachverständige, Übersetzer ausschließlich nach den folgenden Vorschriften entschädigt.
(3) Die Entschädigung für die Übersetzung eines Textes aus einer Sprache in eine andere Sprache beträgt 1 Euro je Zeile. Ist die Übersetzung erschwert, insbesondere wegen der Verwendung von Fachausdrücken oder wegen schwerer Lesbarkeit des Textes, so kann die Entschädigung bis auf 3 Euro, bei außergewöhnlich schwierigen Texten bis auf 4,30 Euro je Zeile erhöht werden. Für eine oder für mehrere Übersetzungen auf Grund desselben Auftrags beträgt die Entschädigung mindestens 13 Euro.
(4) Als Zeile gilt die Zeile der angefertigten schriftlichen Übersetzung, die durchschnittlich 50 Schriftzeichen enthält. Werden in der angefertigten Übersetzung keine lateinischen Schriftzeichen verwendet, war aber ein Text mit lateinischen Schriftzeichen zu übersetzen, so sind die Zeilen dieses Textes maßgebend. Angefangene Zeilen von mehr als 30 Schriftzeichen gelten als volle Zeilen, angefangene Zeilen von 30 oder weniger Schriftzeichen werden zu vollen Zeilen zusammengezogen.

bq. Section 17 Interpreters and translators
(1) The provisions of this statute shall apply to interpreters and translators with the appropriate changes.
(2) Interpreters shall be compensated for their services in the same way as expert witnesses, and translators exclusively under the following provisions.
(3) The compensation for translating a text from one language into another language shall be one euro per line. If the translation is more difficult than usual, in particular because technical terms or used or because the text is hard to read, the compensation may be increased to up to 3 euros per line, and in the case of extraordinarly difficult texts up to 4.30 euros per line. For one or more translations on the basis of the same order, the minimum compensation shall be 13 euros.
(4) A line means a line of the final translation in writing containing an average of 50 characters. If the final translation contains no characterst of the Latin alphabet, but the original text to be translated consisted of characters of the Latin alphabet

Berufsakademien in Baden-Württemberg can call themselves universities by German legislation (see earlier entry). Foreign authorities will have to decide whether they are universities by foreign standards. But who lays down their English name, what language advice did they have and what are the consequences?

Following the realization that the strange term University of Cooperative Education was not Baden-Württemberg’s answer to Monty Python, Paul Thomas wrote to the Berufsakademie Stuttgart to see what they had to say for themselves. Paul was complaining about the use of the word university rather than cooperative education. The reply said there was a decision of the Conference of the Ministers for Cultural Affairs and Education of the Länder in 1995 which proclaimed that these Berufsakademien were equivalent to universities. To quote the email from the Berufsakademie Stuttgart to Paul:

bq. Mit dem KMK-Beschluss von 1995 ist der Abschluss an Berufsakademien dem Abschluss an Fachhochschulen gleichgestellt worden. Dies ist in Baden-Württemberg auch gesetzlich verankert worden. Siehe hierzu Berufsakademiegesetz § 1, Abs. 2. Im Zuge der internationalen Namensgebung der Fachhochschulen 1998 / 99 haben auch die Berufsakademien die internationale Bezeichnung University erhalten.

More on next page: Continue reading →

I am fascinated by the terminology questions at ProZ.com. I haven’t looked at the job offers. The funny thing about the terminology queries is that if you ask a question, you get to choose the winner and award them, say, 4 KudoZ (sic – presumably a plural). There are also BrowniZ, and there are even dollars, but I have none of those. If someone posts an answer, you can get some benefit by agreeing, or even disagreeing with it. The question is, can the person who asked the question tell the difference between good and bad answers?

It’s well worth trying out if you have a really difficult question, because there are some good people there and they will do a lot of work, very fast, to help you.

I recently dropped my pseudonym Zirbelholz and outed myself with my real name. But I am a bit miffed to get this comment on an answer of mine (I don’t know how long this link will be valid):

bq. Comment: Yikes!!! Verleumdung is a TORT, NOT AN OFFENSE

(there followed four exclamation marks, but Movable Type didn’t like those, or maybe it was HTML).