Thanks to the mysterious Neil Desperandum on Twitter for this.
Der Schimmelreiter was translated by Denis Jackson as The Dykemaster. See New Books in German. See also an earlier post. Denis Jackson died at the age of 84 in February 2020. Obituary in the Guardian.
Der Schimmel can mean mould or a grey horse.
I recently heard a webinar by Christin Dallmann and Richard Delaney on translation problems in contract law. I highly recommend these webinars. It reminded me of that old chestnut: do we use ‘shall’ in a contract (when drafting or translating)?
Richard Delaney has now written a guest post on the use of ‘shall’ in Kevin Lossner’s Translation Tribulations blog, https://www.translationtribulations.com/2021/05/richard-delaney-on-shall.html. Kevin writes that this text was originally part of a social media discussion, but I don’t know where that was and didn’t see it. I am not going to argue point-by-point with Richard’s summary, just set out my own.
I think the mandatory verb in a contract can be shall, will or must. It ought to be used exclusively (some English contracts mix shall and will). I do not think the choice of verb form is likely to confuse any reader. The reader will realize that the verb imposes an obligation.
I posted on this on March 1 2013, since when I have surely changed my mind in some ways.
Shall I or shan’t I? Shall, must and the plain language brigade. The comments are interesting though.
Thornton on legislative drafting is relevant too, although it’s about legislation, not contracts.
One of the commenters on Kevin’s blog, Stephen Rifkin, writes:
According to the legal experts I have consulted in books and person, “shall” is very simple – legal obligation. A body, personal or legal, can have an obligation. Therefore, it is correct to say: The Tenant shall pay the rent on the 1st of the month but incorrect to say that “The rent shall be paid on the 1st of the month.”
I understand his point, but I would use shall here too, despite the lack of a subject. It does annoy me when German contracts appear to impose duties without indicating who is responsible, but I wonder what the alternative translation would be – varying the verb when the German doesn’t?
One objection to shall I have read recently is that since it is used in a variety of ways, it is more confusing than must for non-native speakers of English who nevertheless have to make do with English translations (rather than Arabic or whatever). That seems possible.
As often mentioned, Bryan Garner is an advocate of avoiding shall altogether (in original English contracts, of course). I think he got this from a movement in Australia and Canada. He lists something like 16 uses of shall, most of them unsatisfactory.
Writers who advocate plain English in law also condemn shall. One argument I’ve read is that if shall is used in different ways within one contract, a court might query whether it has a mandatory meaning at all. I would certain advise against using shall in more than one sense (for example, ‘If the landlord shall…’). Of course, I am not drafting a contract, but always translating a contract where the German version is defined as binding, so I doubt that a messily translated contract would be challenged in court, but you never know.
I will quote the third edition of Leech on will in contracts.
There is a difference between the will of insistence above and a QUASI-IMPERATIVE will found with second- and third-person subects: You will do as I say. The Duty Officer will report for duty at 0700 hours. This will is a stronger equivalent of must, and expre000sses the will of the originator of the message, rather than of the subject. It also differs from the will of insistence in that it is not strongly stressed. The quasi-imperative will seems to be a special use of the future will of ‘prediction’, the implication being that the speaker or writer has so much authority over the addressee that failure to perform the predicted action is out of the question. Hence it has military and despotic associations.
The verbs shall and will can be used to refer to the future but also as modal verbs (there is some overlap between future and modal uses). There is no ‘simple future’. For example, the German ‘morgen fahre ich nach Hause’ is not translated as ‘I will go home tomorrow’, but usually as ‘I am going home tomorrow’. ‘I will go home tomorrow’ might be said at the moment of decision or as a promise. Without going into more detail, in a contract I have always seen ‘The insurer will…reimburse’ as a promise made in a contract and therefore binding. (But Geoffrey Leech calls it ‘quasi-imperative’, see above).
When giving examples of usage, it is a good idea to stick to the affirmative use, excluding negatives and questions, which only confuse the description.
And on shall:
RULES AND REGULATIONS (with second-person or third-person subjects)
A player who bids incorrectly shall forfeit fifty points {rules of a card game. The hood shall be of scarlet cloth, with a silk lining of the colour of the faculty {rules for academic dress}.
This usage is found only in legal or quasi-legal documents. Here shall could be replaced by must (=’obligation’), or by the ‘quasi-imperative’ will.
Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, 3rd ed. 2011
Following on from the previous post, it seems that US/UK banker’s boxes are similar to the German ones.
Assembling a bankers box – Youtube video. This isn’t quite the same as the German boxes, but a similar principle.
And Thomson Reuters legal blog has a post Why do they call them Bankers Boxes?
It seems that the inventor, Walter Nickel, sold these boxes to banks to store records. He sold the rights when he was called up for WWI in 1917 (did he survive?). The buyer, Harry Fellowes, named his company the Bankers Box Company. It later became Fellowes.
Legal stationery – the topic that keeps on giving.
Thanks to Tom West.
The German Bücherkarton uses a cunning folding system that holds it together without tape. Are other German removal boxes the same?
The British removal box first has to be taped all round the base, then after it is filled it has to be taped round the top. Query whether the box can be reused after the effort of taping and then cutting open.
LATER NOTE: Tom West tweeted me about the existence of banker’s boxes in the USa – and seemingly in the UK too – see following entry.
Contrary to appearances, this blog is not yet dead. However, I did not mention that on 16 April it was 18 years old.
To make up for it, here is a photo I took on April 14 near Fenchurch Street Station.
The Pencil Talk blog has a new post on notarial string. I wrote about this in December 2004! (Links are unlikely to work now). Which reminds me that this blog is coming up for a birthday in April, if it survives that long.
Pencil Talk has some great photos of notarial string and seals. As it says, each German Land has a different-coloured string, and there is a federal one too. Useful links there, for instance to a list of all colours of string.
Here is a picture of what I found – some green English ribbon and some Federal German notarial string. 
There’s a link to an article on treasury tags in the Bleistift blog.
I think English notaries public use ribbon, as barristers do. The ribbon may be green, and for barristers pink, but it’s entered the language as ‘red tape’.
Translators in Germany sometimes use notarial string, but then they argue about whether they are allowed to or not.
Edited to add a picture of a bodger lookalike.
What I knew as a bodger, which punches a single hole in the corner of a bundle of papers, ready to take the treasury tag, did not have a hole for thread.
It’s been pointed out to me in a comment on the Bleistift blog that bodger may be called awl or pricker. Awl seems to be right. Here’s one of many.