There’s an article on the German Federal Constitutional Court on the Matrix Chambers eutopialaw blog, by a German law professor called Daniel Thym, which is really heavy going and I wonder if it was written in English or translated in the writer’s head from German.

Since first posting this, I have discovered that there is an original German text online (see notes at end). So I include it:

Nun lassen sich die Kritiker das Argument der Verfassungswidrigkeit nicht so schnell aus der Hand nehmen.

Critics won’t renounce at the argument that bailouts violate the German constitution single-handedly.

Der mediale Hype um die Bundestags-Abstimmungen zur Euro-Rettung sowie die BVerfG-Urteile zeigt, wie die verfassungsjuristische Stärkung des Nationalstaats in eine politische Alltagspraxis umschlägt, die ihrerseits eine diskursive und identifikatorische Stärkung der nationalstaatlichen Identität mit sich bringt.

Extensive media coverage, both domestic and international, of the German Constitutional Court judgments and parliamentary votes show that the fortification of domestic institutions by means of constitutional interpretation has an impact upon everyday political practices which bring about the discursive strengthening of national identity.

I’m afraid my constitutional-law translations might sound like this.

I’ve bought a book on copyright law, I think it was, before now where I only realized after I had got it that it was by a non-native speaker and too hard to read. I admire translators who understand how to mould German sentences into natural English ones, but I’m not sure I know enough about the art.

But there’s a following post by Peter Lindseth, who has written on the blog before, and that is fine as usual.

LATER NOTE: Ah, I see from Lindseth’s post that the Daniel Thym post was translated into English. That’s a relief, but it shouldn’t be! Here’s the original German.

Via The Guardian and Slate, a law professor analyses (verse 2 of) 99 Problems, a 2004 song by Jay-Z, from the point of view of criminal law: Caleb Mason, Saint Louis University School of Law, Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps.

1. The year is ‘94 and in my trunk is raw
2. In my rearview mirror is the motherfucking law
3. I got two choices y’all, pull over the car or
4. Bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor
5. Now I ain’t trying to see no highway chase with jake
6. Plus I got a few dollars I can fight the case
7. So I . . . pull over to the side of the road
8. And I Heard “Son do you know what I’m stopping you for?”
9. “Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low?
10. Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don’t know
11. Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?”

99 Problems is a song by Jay-Z1. It’s a good song. It was a big hit in 2004. I’m writing about it now because it’s time we added it to the canon of criminal procedure pedagogy. In one compact, teachable verse (Verse 2), the song forces us to think about traffic stops, vehicle searches, drug smuggling, probable cause, and racial profiling, and it beautifully tees up my favorite pedagogical heuristic: life lessons for cops and robbers. And as it turns out, I’m not late to the game after all: Jay-Z recently published a well-received volume of criticism and commentary that includes his own marginal notes on Verse 2 of 99 Problems.

LATER NOTE: I don’t read much US criminal law so I had to look up suppression claim – suppression of evidence (Unterdrücken von Beweismaterial?). The article is helpful to drug dealers, who need to know in exactly which circumstances evidence produced in the search of a car can be suppressed by the court because the search was unlawful, and to police, who need to know that it’s best if the K-9 unit – vehicle with drug-sniffing dogs – is already there when the vehicle is stopped.

I know the purpose of a weblog is to spread sunshine and light rather than criticizing other people’s work. But I must comment on a German criminal law weblog’s suggestion of learning English criminal-law terminology.

Here’s what I wrote on Beleidigung in 2003:

In English and U.S. law, defamation is nearly always a tort, not a crime. It consists, loosely speaking, in communicating to a third party some fact about the victim that tends to lower his or her reputation among right-thinking people. If the fact is true, that is a complete defence. Thus, three people are needed. One form, libel, is in permanent form (often writing), and the other, slander, is not.
In German law, there is also defamation, and the word Diffamierung can be used. The two forms of defamation differ in seriousness, but both can be either permanent or impermanent, in speech or in writing. To distinguish them, therefore, libel and slander won’t do.
These two offences (üble Nachrede and Verleumdung) are part of a group of offences headed Beleidigung. These offences also include insult, for which only two people are needed, and a form of assault – if you indicate your disrespect for someone by spitting in their face, this is also covered, and I am calling it assault, although the problem with that is that the English reader may not realize its connection to insult. There are a couple of other offences, such as insulting the dead.

How, then, to translate the heading Beleidigung? I used to ask my students this question with the example of a list of crime statistics. My answer would have been Insult, assault and defamation.

Now, in the crime statistics summary, I find Insult, assault and battery. That is very good, but what has happened to the defamation? It has completely disappeared.

In the Federal Ministry of Justice’s translation of the Criminal Code (via German Law Archive), the heading for the group of offences is the misleading Insult, üble Nachrede is translated as malicious gossip (whereas it can be in writing or oral) and Verleumdung as defamation (which applies equally to both terms).

Now from strafrechtsblogger: Ihr wollt es doch auch! Englisch für Strafrechtler

and Ihr wollt es doch auch! Englisch für Strafrechtler II

recommending English equivalents for meetings with English-speaking clients.

I wondered what the source was – the translations of Criminal Code headings don’t correspond to the ‘official’ Bohlander translation or to that on the German Law Archive website, nor to the ancient US army translation I used to use. But apparently they come from a Bundespolizei document:

Die Übersetzungen stammen übrigens von einem Merkblatt der Bundespolizei und sind offenbar ausländer(straf)rechtlich besonders relevant.

Can anyone find that online? A quick look at www.bundespolizei.de did not produce it.

But the real problem is that German, English and U.S. (various) criminal law systems differ and you can’t just take one English term and treat it as if it meant the same as the original German.

Something terrible happened to the English language at the Venice architecture biennale last week (29th August 2012).

The German pavilion had an event entitled Reuse the Public.

This is from a PDF on the event:

Unter der Moderation von Brigitte Holz, Architektin und Stadtplanerin BDA, Freischlad + Holz, Darmstadt/Berlin und Prof. Dr. Riklef Rambow, Fachgebiet Architekturkommunikation, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, stellten sich drei Vertreter verschiedener Projekte dem “reuse the public”.

Nach einem Grußwort des Generalkommissars Muck Petzet und der Eröffnung durch Michael Frielinghaus, Präsident des BDA, Friedberg, sprachen die Gesprächsgäste über ihre Projekte und traten in den Dialog zwischen Ort, Deutschem Beitrag und Thema “Reuse the public”.

I have come to the conclusion that they were playing with the term ‘public reuse’, which works. You can talk about the public reuse of land or buildings. But not about reusing the public. It sounds like using something again when you shouldn’t. Did it not occur to them to consult a native speaker?

There was a Fürth contribution about the Neue Mitte, the lobbying group that first formed to combat the ‘sale’ of a public street to a new shopping centre, but they weren’t responsible for this murder of the English language.

I understand that English words may enter German and then be treated in a new way. But this was an international event where English speakers were also expected to understand it.

On the subject of Denglish, next Saturday is the Tag der Deutschen Sprache so the Verein Deutsche Sprache should be having fun. Here’s an article (in German) on the problems.

Am Samstag (8. September) ruft der Verein Deutsche Sprache zum zwölften Mal den Tag der deutschen Sprache aus. Die Fronten bleiben verhärtet. Schwierig sei der Einzug des Englischen vor allem dann, wenn die deutsche Sprachgemeinschaft gar nicht erst auf die Idee kommt, deutsche Begriffe für etwas Neues zu suchen, weil sie das Englische für moderner und lebendiger hält, sagt Holger Klatte vom Verein Deutsche Sprache in Dortmund. “Für Shitstorm könnte man auch sehr gut Empörungswelle sagen”, findet der Sprachwissenschaftler.

So richtig passt das aber eben nicht, urteilte die Jury des Anglizismus 2011. “Sprachgemeinschaften entlehnen keine Wörter für etwas, für das sie schon ein Wort haben”, sagt Stefanowitsch. Der Shitstorm zum Beispiel ist ein ganz spezieller Sturm der Entrüstung, der sich im Internet immer mehr hochschaukelt, besonders in den sozialen Plattformen.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports on mistranslations from the English in German media: Pädagogischer Betrug (with comments – in German). I got this from Sprachlog, where Anatol Stefanowitsch is also uncertain as to what the article is saying:

Mit sinnentstellenden Übersetzungsfehlern (bundes-)deutscher Qualitätsmedien befasst sich die Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Aus „Arabern“ werden da einfach „Ausländer“, aus einem „geselligen“ gar ein „genialer“ Mitt Romney. Sicher richtig, aber erstens bleibt unklar, was uns der Autor damit sagen will (außer, dass Fehler eben vorkommen), und zweitens ist die Handvoll Beispiele über einen Zeitraum von mehreren Jahren verteilt, sodass unklar bleibt, wie systematisch die Übersetzungsprobleme tatsächlich sind.

On top of that, the translation of ‘genial’ Mitt Romney as German genial (brilliant, haha) was reported on by Martin Crellin in false friends, good and bad translation a couple of weeks ago. And there, of course, something useful was made of it.

Genial (auf Englisch) heißt so viel wie „sympathisch“. Es ist komisch, aber wir haben kein richtiges Adjektiv für das Substantiv Genius – oft wird genius selbst genommen („he is a genius architect“) – aber schön ist das nicht. Besser ist in der Regel was ganz anderes aber ähnliches („brilliant“ zum Beispiel).

Translegal.com teaches legal English, and this week they had an entry on the verbs used for ending a contract: How to End Things, by Peter Dahlen.

I’m rather obsessed about this topic because it’s something I was never satisfied with when I was teaching legal translation. Indeed, contract is rather a big beast to teach translators because on the one hand there are the elements of the law, but these need to be followed up by a long consideration of the texts used in practice.

Back to Translegal: obviously these drafting tips are elementary information for those drafting contracts in the USA. Translators into English need to know which verb corresponds to the verb in their source language. This is a recurrent problem – worst of all to teach, I think.

The Translegal list is a good starting point, defining four nouns:

Termination typically refers to the ending of a contract, usually before the natural end of the anticipated term of the contract, which may be by mutual agreement or by exercise of one party of one of his remedies due to the default of the other party.
…
Cancellation refers to the ending of a contract by destroying its force, validity, or effectiveness. Generally, cancellation puts an end to a contract by discharging the other party from obligations as yet unperformed, usually because the other party has breached or defaulted.
…
Expiration (or expiry) signifies a coming to an end of a contract period.
…
Rescission generally refers to the act or process of rescinding (i.e. undoing or unmaking) a contract. More specifically, it refers to the right of the parties involved within a contract to return to the identical state they were in before they entered into the agreement.

Repudiation refers to the refusal to perform a duty or obligation owed to the other party. It consists of such words or actions by the contracting party as indicate that she is not going to perform her contractual duties in the future.

Let me start by saying that expiry is the common term in British English, rather than expiration. And throwing out the term repudiation for translation purposes, at least from German. Repudiate is the verb commonly used when a minor seems to have entered into a fairly weighty contract and is permitted to get out of the contract within a certain time after reaching the age of majority. This is a narrow sense and not one I’ve ever needed in translation from German. It implies not only rejecting one’s own contract, but being legally able to do so (under English law).

Expiry is also an easy one – if a contract expires, it does so automatically. It’s the other three verbs – terminate, cancel and rescind – which describe an act by a party to the contract.

Now, let’s consider the German. I’ll just start by listing some of the collocations in Romain’s DE>EN dictionary:

Einen Vertrag
als ungültig behandeln: to repudiate
anfechten: to avoid
aufheben: to cancel by mutual agreement
kündigen: to terminate

I’ll add Rücktritt

The situation varies according to the kind of contract – for example, a lease of land is an ongoing contract which sooner or later may be terminated/gekündigt by one of the parties, whereas a contract of sale is a one-off arrangement which will normally just be completed with no particular irregularities.

I don’t see great problems in linking kündigen and terminate (I seem to remember that some non-law translators on a UK mailing list got rather excited about the idea of terminating employment – presumably they had read more science fiction than law – and wanted to use dismiss. Dismiss is OK (or not OK) if the employer does it to the employee, but the employee can’t dismiss the employer). One can also get tied up in knots about termination and notice of termination – kündigen can mean both – but I think most translators can sort that out.

Rescission (to rescind) usually means putting an end to the contract and putting both parties back into their original positions, as far as possible (ex tunc). But it doesn’t always!
Cancel, I gather, tends to mean ending it from the present point (ex nunc).

I was going to pursue this topic further, but I think it has reached the point where no one would have the energy to read any further. I think what might be good would be for me to make a list of legal terms with their meanings as relevant to translators into English. But not today.