Tag Archives: translation

Severance clause / Salvatorische Klausel

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Here’s a severance clause (severability clause, saving clause) from Mark Anderson, A-Z Guide to Boilerplate and Commercial Clauses:

If any provision of this agreement is prohibited by law or judged by a court to be unlawful, void or unenforceable, the provision shall, to the extent required, be severed from this agreement and rendered ineffective as far as possible without modifying the remaining provisions of this agreement, and shall not in any way affect any other circumstances of or the validity or enforcement of this agreement.

Plenty of other examples can be found online for harvesting elements to translate a German salvatorische Klausel.

The courts won’t always accept the clause, but it might help, for instance, where an employment contract has a clause in restraint of trade governing post-termination work.

I found salvatorische Klausel in the small Langenscheidt-Alpmann dictionary but not otherwise. Maybe that’s why DE>EN translators are always asking what it is.

At all events, the weblog verbraucherrechtliches … is looking at some inadmissible general terms and conditions and has an entry on salvatorische Klauseln.

Some clauses add nothing to the provisions of the Civil Code, but are harmless.
But this:

Anstelle der unwirksamen Bestimmungen gilt eine angemessene zulässige Regelung, die den angestrebten wirtschaftlichen Zweck weitgehend erreichen.

is apparently known as geltungserhaltende Reduktion and is NO GOOD. Consequences here.

Of course, this doesn’t relieve us from translating them into English.

Sarkozy subtitles / Untertitel bei Sarkozy

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I’m a bit late on this story of a freelance subtitle translator slipping a joke into the programme (accidentally?)

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This was apparently an American freelance and the subtitles were seen in the USA on April 23:

Le 23 avril, un reportage du journal montre un discours de Nicolas Sarkozy. A un moment, le candidat UMP invite les Français à «s’unir à moi». Ce qui, traduit avec un brin de fantaisie en anglais, donne: «rally my inflated ego» («unissez-vous à mon ego surdimensionné»).

English reports here and here.

A top official with France 2 swiftly blamed the gag on American freelance journalists who play with the translations to amuse each other, including this one that managed to surface on television instead of their PC’s.

None of this explains how you can ‘fire’ or ‘sack’ a freelance.

Via Enig

Corrections by customers / Kundenkorrektur

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ck’s comment on a recent entry warrants more discussion so I reproduce it here:

Dieser Gedanke “I will be more likely to devise some rules of etiquette and consider how to phrase comments to the author, rather than seguing into a rant about stupid foreigners who think they can write English.” sollte irgendwie standardisiert werden. Zu einem aus dem Deutschen uebersetzten Vertrag machte ich mir kuerzlich diese Gedanken, die gegenueber dem Uebersetzer hoffentlich fair sind:
“Zunaechst ist der englische Text fuer den amerikanischen Juristen sowie Gerichte, Schiedsgerichte und die Geschworenen im Zivilprozess nicht verstaendlich. Das gilt bei einzelnen Passagen ganz besonders, aber im Ergebnis auch fuer den gesamten Vertrag.
Dabei will ich nicht die Uebersetzerarbeit kritisieren. Die amerikanische Juristensprache ist schon fuer Amerikaner schlimm genug. Fast kein Uebersetzer kann bei der Uebersetzung von Begriffen aus einer Sprache in die andere auch die hinter jedem Begriff stehenden Rechtsbedeutungen kennen. Um der rechtlichen Bedeutung jeden Begriffs gerecht zu werden, muesste der Uebersetzer ja auch den Vertrag umschreiben.”
Ist das fair? Wieviel Toleranz haben Uebersetzer fuer die Kommentierung ihrer Arbeit durch Anwaelte? Wenn Anwaelte und Uebersetzer unabhaengig voneinander fuer einen Auftraggeber arbeiten, kann sich die Arbeit verdoppeln. Wenn sie zusammenarbeiten – oder dem Anwalt zumindest mitgeteilt wird, ob der Vertrag von einem Uebersetzer uerbersetzt wurde oder nur einen Versuch darstellt, einen Vertrag auf Englisch zu verfassen -, lassen sich einige Probleme vermeiden.

I can’t have made myself clear. I was referring to corrections of guides to churches and castles, where the correction contains wrong grammar. For instance, I once had my name omitted from a brochure where I had written (rather stiffly) ‘The boot [a bootmaker’s diploma work] has a height of 2 m’ and this was changed by the author into ‘The boot has a high of 2 m’, on the assumption that I couldn’t write English. The example ck refers to, where a lawyer, who may be a German who has lived in the USA for a long time, corrects the translator’s knowledge of English law. That is certainly not what I meant by a native speaker being corrected by a non-native – in fact I don’t see the connection.

So, what does a translator think if a lawyer corrects the translator’s legal English?

I don’t know! My legal English is sometimes corrected by German lawyers. Indeed, I can well imagine that they change whatever they like and don’t report back to me. After all, the translations aren’t often published. And I can’t remember getting a comment on the few occasions when my work was received by an English lawyer.

There surely might be problems. ck is thinking of using terms appropriate for a U.S. lawyer or layperson. I might not have the right ones for an English lawyer or layperson. My translations go to more than one country and not just to native speakers of English. That’s why I was interested in the presentation referred to. If I suddenly started translating regularly for people solely in the England and Wales legal system, I think I would have to be broken in. I would have to be grateful for any correction.

But what do they want? Examples, ck? I have a feeling I would be wanted to translate Rechtsanwalt as solicitor and Kläger as claimant. I am afraid there would be cases where I would not be happy about this. Much as I like to do a lot of what the customer wants, there is a limit to how many specialized vocabularies I can keep apart.

German literary translators in the press/Die SZ und die Literaturübersetzer

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An article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 2 February 2007 by Thomas Steinfeld, the editor of the arts pages, is no longer available except for subscribers: Ein Haus für Rechthaber.

It’s described in an article by Burkhard Kroeber on perlentaucher.de. Apparently Steinfeld says the huge decline in literary translations into German over the past year is directly attributable to the desire of literary translators for more money: they see their work only as a financial and bureaucratic reality and give no thought to ‘cultural dialogue’, its most important feature.

Further reactions by literary translators can be found on the website of the VdÜ, the professional association for literary translators.

(Via …is a blog)

Accessibility / Barrierefreiheit

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Jeremy Keith of Adactio went to Berlin last December for the BIENE website accessibility awards and wondered about the German language, under the heading ‘The language of accessibility’:

… I was thinking about the German word being used to describe accessibility: “Barrierefreiheit”, literally “free from obstacles.” It’s a good word, but because it’s describes websites by what they don’’t contain (obstacles), it leads to a different way of thinking about the topic.
In English, it’’s relatively easy to qualify the word “accessible.” We can talk about sites being “quite accessible”, “fairly accessible”, or “very accessible”. But if you define accessibility as a lack of obstacles, then as long as a single obstacle remains in place it’s hard to use the word “barrierefrei” as an adjective. The term is too binary; black or white; yes or no.

This also relates to the fact that creating an accessible website is not such a problem as keeping it accessible, and ensuring a client has an accessible website is not a question of expensive extras, but of fewer extras.

He was also a bit concerned that he might have offended jury members by calling them all du (I presume not).

(Transblawg is a not a barrier-free website)

LATER NOTE: Transblawg may well be more barrier-free since its move to Serendipity.

Kinds of goods /Waren und Güter

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Wikipedia has an entry headed Final good, which subsumes all kinds of things as goods. For example, the public good and private good are listed as types of goods.

I am in a quandary. I don’t feel like correcting the article, because it is about economics terms and not language. I also feel that people like the Language Log bloggers would see me as a prescriptivist.

But for me, the public good is an abstract, only ever used in the singular, and consumer goods always has an s on the end, and never the twain shall meet. That is, goods is an example of pluralia tantum – nouns that in a particular sense occur only in the plural.

However, there is also a technical meaning of good: a particular article that is produced in order to be sold. So it’s not part of everyday English, but it fits in that article. I’m still not happy with the heading – it’s not a disambiguation article, after all.