This publication on the EU judicial systems is available only in French, either as a book or as a free PDF file.
It’s so wonderful that the EU lets us all read things in our own languages.
(Via ComparativeLawBlog)
The Independent has now published an obituary of Erwin Wickert (see my earlier entry).
Among other postware matters, itt records an encounter with Tariq Ali during a protect at the German Embassy in London in 1968.
three percent, a ‘Resource for international literature at the University of Rochester’ (links, weblog, translation program), has published a longlist of the best literary translations in 2007. Not much German, but Der Gehilfe by Robert Walser could be fun.
Here’s the analysis.
Twenty-one languages are represented on the list, with French (11 books or 22%) being the most, Spanish (10, 20%) in second, and German (4), Russian (4), and Japanese (3) rounding out the top five. Two titles from both Arabic and Hebrew made the list, and the following languages each had one title: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, and Turkish. Overall, a pretty nice balance.
(Thanks to Trevor)
The British media are spreading lies about Germany yet again.
From today’s Guardian:
And a number of us will need to beware of what Germans call the Tantenverführer (aunt seducer) at this year’s office Christmas party, a young man of suspiciously good manners you suspect of devious motives…
Admittedly the article is by someone who wrote a whole book about odd words in foreign languages (‘Adam Jacot de Boinod is the author of Toujours Tingo published by Penguin’, another young man who may have devious motives). One wonders who gave him this one. Perhaps Mark McCrum?
Like Spinatwachtel (another rare word) in the LEO forum, I found Google suggested this was not known to German speakers:
googelt man nach “Tantenverführer” – Seiten auf Deutsch, erhält man bezeichnenderweise die Nachricht, daß es da nichts gäbe, ob man in einer anderen Sprache gucken möchte. Man klickt “ja”, und hey presto! 14 Hits, die fast alle mit diesem Buch zu tun haben.
Poodle-faker habe ich jetzt immer noch kein Gefühl für, welcher Slang ist das denn? Und kanntest du es schon, bevor du im Wörterbuch nachgeschaut hast? Ladies’ man hingegen habe ich schon gehört.
I’m not the first to comment on this. But I hope no-one gives me this for Christmas!
LATER NOTE: At Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer did a nice, if premature, piece on the author’s earlier book in 2005:
The multitudinous errors in such books should not be surprising; as Mark Liberman has reminded us, when a factoid about language is attractive enough, “the linguistic truth of the matter is beside the point.”
There was a discussion of the IAB Glossar on a translators’ mailing list recently. I was interested to know if anyone else found it useful. There came praise in the highest tones from an in-house ministry translator. I suspected the book was of most use to German civil servants who knew the topic and were working into English.
Here’s an entry on Freisetzung von Personal (click to enlarge):
It looks to me as if that definition is a definition of the German term, which happens to appear in English. The identical definition appears in the EN to DE half.
This sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. Where did they find their English definition? I’d have to research it. Dietl is completely different: in the DE to EN part, it will have a definition of Amtsgericht, for example, in both languages. And I know as the reader that that is Dietl’s definition summarizing the German situation. But the IAB approach is not good for people translating between two systems of law. If I don’t know which system is being referred to, how can I assess the quality of the suggestion?
Another thing I found odd was that the word Freistellung was not given in the garden leave sense, which is quite common nowadays, of preventing people from working out their notice.
I did post a query, but unfortunately it was misunderstood as a request for more information about gross misconduct:
Könntest Du mir ein Problem erklären, das ich mit diesen Glossaren habe: im EN>DE Teil (2004 Ausgabe) unter “gross misconduct” steht eine lange Definition auf Englisch: “gross misconduct represents a serious transgression of disciplinary rules, which is normally punished through dismissal without notice …”, ohne Quellangabe. Im DE>EN Teil steht unter grobes Fehlverhalten keine deutsche Definition, sondern genau die gleich englische Definition, wieder ohne Quellangabe. Unter “Verfehlung” steht zum dritten Mal genau die gleiche englische Definition, wieder ohne Quellangabe.
EN>DE steht “schwere, / grobe Verfehlung, grobes Fehlverhalten” als
Übersetzungen.Ich habe den Eindruck, dass hier eine Definition aus dem deutschen Arbeitsrecht steht, aber da wäre es leicht, einen Paragrafen zu nennen. Und die deutsche Fassung der Definition müsste auch zu finden sein. Das ist mit ein Grund, warum ich das Buch selten öffne, gerade weil auch ich mich mit feinen Unterschieden beschäftigen und auskennen muss. Ich habe den Eindruck, hier ist ein internes Werk, das für Deutsche Beamten gedacht ist, die deutsches ins Englische übersetzen und denen die deutschen Definitionen bekannt sind, aber die gerne Hilfe bei der englischen Formulierung hätten.
(For details of this book, see earlier entry – it’s apparently available as a CD too now)
In The Parking Ticket Awards: Crazy Councils, Meter Madness and Traffic Warden Hell, Barrie Segal (described by some as Britain’s leading expert on traffic tickets) collects odd parking tickets.
amazon.de link:
The Parking Ticket Awards: Crazy Councils, Meter Madness and Traffic Warden Hell
Examples in this article:
Robert McFarland’s horse was given a parking ticket under the heading, “Vehicle Description: Brown Horse”.
A motorist who received a ticket in an NCP car park, despite returning to her car an hour early, was told the attendant had fined her because he had “reasonable cause to think she would stay longer than the four hours for which she had paid”.
Here’s a picture of a British parking ticket (not my car):
Segal also runs a website helping people to fight parking tickets.
www.strafzettel.de looks considerably more strait-laced.
(via Legal Juice)
I haven’t got the TLS for this week yet, but one article is online: a review by Adrian Tarhourdin of a book by a French professor of literature and psychoanalyst on how to talk about books one has not read:
Pierre Bayard
Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus?
162pp. Minuit. 15euros. 978 2 7073 1982 1
Bayard finds three constraints shaming us: the need to read, the need to read something to the bitter end, and the need to read a book if we are to talk about it.
[Bayard] divides the works he mentions into four categories: LI indicates livres inconnus (books he is unfamiliar with); LP livres parcourus (books glanced at); LE livres dont jai entendu parler (books he has heard discussed) and LO les livres que jai oubliés (books he has read but forgotten). Ulysses, for example, falls into the category LE: he claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.
Here’s a quote from Bayard himself:
“in order to . . . talk without shame about books we havent read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves.”
Like Bayard at one point in the article, I am not sure how blatant one should be about ignorance. For instance, I once spent some time around a dinner table where another guest spent some time discussing how bad the Harry Potter novels (as it happens) are, but she hadn’t read any of them herself.
The Times online (via Boing Boing) reports that it may be possible to trace the person who leaked the Harry Potter book in photos on the Web yesterday (the publisher, Bloomsbury, won’t confirm that this was genuine, presumably as a damage limitation exercise). The serial number of the camera is part of the EXIF data, and if the camera, an early Digital Rebel, has been repaired or registered, the number will be linked to a name.
However, there would probably be no criminal charges, as there was no commercial gain. Civil damages would be based on the loss in book sales.
If traced, the person who photographed the Harry Potter novel could be found guilty of copyright infringement, but would be unlikely to face criminal charges as the photos appear not to have been published for commercial gain, lawyers said.
“There are criminal provisions in copyright legislation, but they tend to be used in cases of obvious counterfeiting – such as selling fake computer games or DVDs in a car boot sale,” Mark Owen, an intellectual property partner at the London firm Harbottle & Lewis, said. “If Bloomsbury were to pursue an action, it would more likely be a civil case, in which case any damages would be assessed according to the loss in book sales.”
The Times calls the EXIF numbers ‘digital DNA’!
Some EXIF data (bottom left) from a Sony DSC-H5 (click to enlarge).
Something in this picture was too much for Boyds Mills Press in the USA. They wanted to publish a translation of Rotraut Susanne Berner’s children’s book, but without this picture and another picture of a nude, both exhibits in an art gallery. The author insisted on the censorship being made obvious, for example by the pictures being blacked out, so it seems the book is unlikely to appear. Die Welt writes:
Erst im Februar hatten US-Bibliotheken ein preisgekröntes Kinderbuch aus ihren Regalen verbannt, weil auf der ersten Seite das Wort scrotum (Hodensack) vorkam. Zuvor geriet selbst Harry Potter wegen angeblicher Bezüge zum Satanismus unter Beschuss der selbst ernannten Sittenwächter.
Author’s nude drawings too hot for US publisher, from the Independent.
Kein deutscher Mini-Penis für die USA, from Die Welt (with 4 illustrations).
LATER NOTE: for visitors from the Absolute Write Water Cooler, here’s the other offending picture:
This subject is generating as much traffic as my old entry on how IKEA names its furniture.
Professor Heikki E.S. Mattila of the University of Lapland has published a book on comparative legal linguistics that looks interesting and expensive. The amazon.com page lets you look inside and see the full table of contents and an extract. The publisher’s page is fairly long too, so I’ll quote from that here:
Contents
Foreword; Foreword to the Finnish original; Part 1 General Introduction: Legal language and legal linguistics; The concept of legal language; Genres of legal language; Legal linguistics as a discipline; The importance of legal-linguistic knowledge; Structure and content of this book. Part 2 Legal Language as a Language for Special Purposes: Functions of Legal Language: Importance of the theory of communication; Achieving justice; Transmission of legal messages; Strengthening the authority of the law; Strengthening lawyers’ team spirit; Linguistic policy; The cultural task of legal language. Part 3 Characteristics of Legal Language: Precision; Information (over)load; Universality and aloofness; Systemic character; Structure and formalism in legal texts; Frequency of initializations and acronyms; Sentence complexity and diversity of language elements; Archaism and solemnity; Proper use of legal language. Legal Terminology: Legal concepts; Characteristics of legal terminology; Formation of legal terminology. The Major Legal Languages: The Heritage of Legal Latin; The importance of Roman law; History of legal Latin; Latin in modern legal languages; The communication value of legal Latin; Dictionaries of legal Latin. Legal German: History of legal German; Characteristics of legal German; International importance of legal German. Legal French: History of legal French; Characteristics of legal French; International position today. Legal English: The common law system; Development of legal English; Characteristics of legal English; Legal English as a global language. Part 4 Conclusion:Lexical comprehension and research needs;changes in legal-linguistic dominance in the international arena; Terminological interaction between legal languages; Problems of lexical comprehension; The need for jurilinguistic research on legal institutions and concepts; Foreign terms and other expressions; Index.
(Via DORES, which has a new set of references out on publications on language and law)
