Tag Archives: terminology

Franglish: le poolish

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I am not getting round to blogging a whole list of topics because I have too much else to do. Here is a sop: I was looking at a baking glossary (DE, EN, IT, FR, NL, ES) that Christiane recommended to see if it looked reliable – it does – and I was struck by the French word for sponge (Vorteig), le poolish. I was even more surprised to discover its origin, from the English word Polish. Yet it refers to the sort of sponge made with baker’s yeast (sourdough is levain). Perhaps this ‘via Vienna’ is the answer:

Ce mode de fabrication a son origine en Pologne, et ce sont les boulangers viennois qui l’introduisirent en France pour Marie Antoinette.

(Before she told them to eat cake). I still don’t see where the ‘English’ came from.

Swiss criminal law terminology / Terminologie des Schweizer Strafrechts

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This vocabulary doesn’t seem familiar to me. Go to the Obergericht, click on Dolmetscherwesen and then on Strafrechtsterminologie der Bundeskanzlei (D, F, I, E). It can’t be copied, but here’s one entry, scanned, to give an impression (scanned, OCR’d but not spellchecked for the various languages):

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Täter (1); Täterin (2); Straftäter (3); Straftäterin (4); Delinquent (5); Delinquentin (6); Straffälliger (7); Straffällige (8)Person, die rechtswidrig und schuldhaft einen gesetzlichen Tatbestand erfüllt hat.
PS: CH; USG: (7)(8) zu vermeiden
(1) Schweiz. Strafgesetzbuch, Art. 7 (SR 311.0): (2) BSG 321.1 G 150395, Art. 46 Abs. 1 Ziff. 1; (3) BFS/BJ,
Anstaltenkatalog, 1998, S. 11: (4) POMBE, Baechtold, 1995; (5) BFS, Rückfallraten, 1997, S. 21; (6)(DF)(USG)
T. Freytag, Universität Freiburg, Seminar für Strafrecht, 2001; (7)(8) BFS, Bewährungshiffe in der Schweiz, 2001,
S.4
auteur (1); auteure (2); auteur de l’lnfraction (3); auteure de l’lnfraction (4); auteur de l’acte (5); auteure de l’acte (6); auteur de l’acte punissabie (7); auteure de l’acte punissabie (8); deltnquant (9); delinquante (10); auteur dlrect (11); auteure directe (12); auteur materiel (13); auteure materielle (14); auteur immediat (15); auteure immediate (16)Personne qui accomplit personneilement, avec la consclence ou ia volonte extgees par la loi, les actes
materlels constitutlfs d’une infraction.
PS:CH
Code penal suisse, (1) art. 7, (3) art. 27 a\. 3, (5) art. 18 ai 3, (9) art. 42 eh. 1 (RS 311.0); (2)(6)(8) CHA BE,
SCTerm, 1997; (4)(12)(14)(16)(GRM) ACH; (7) RSB 321.1 L 150395, art. 235; (10) Cornu, Voc. juridique, 1990,
p. 248; (11)(13)(15) Graven, Infraction penaie punissabie, 1995, p. 282; (DF) d’apres source (10), p. 83 sous
“auteur”
autore (1); autrice (2); autore di un reato (3); autrice di un reato (4); autore di reato (5); autrice di reato (6); autore diretto (7); autrice diretta (8); agente (9); delinquente (10)
Persona che realizza I presupposti oggettivl e soggettivi 6\ un reato. PS: CH: GRM: (9M10)f./m.
(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(DF) aw. M. Hohl Tattarietti, 2001; Codice penaie svizzero, (9) art. 7 cpv. 3, (10) art. 42 n. 1 (RS 311.0)
offender (1); perpetrator (2)Person who commits a crimlnal act with the mens rea required by the law.
PS:CH
(1) Home Office, Digest 2, Criminal Justice System, 1993, p. 7; (2) Romain, Dict. Legat Terms, part 1, EN-DE, 1989;
(DF) adaptation ofFrench definition

On the subject of Swiss German, Jens Wiese at Blogwiese has just announced that he has reached the end of his topic. At the moment he is rehashing old topics. He says that he often gets queries and they are all words he has already discussed. He still writes a weekly column in a couple of Swiss newspapers.

(Thanks to the ubiquitous Urs Wolffers)

Shareholders/Gesellschafter

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The translation of forms of business association is quite complex and takes so long to discuss that the steam goes out of the boiler before the discussion has got off the ground.

I met some U.S. translators briefly last Friday, but not too briefly for one of them to tell me that all the U.S. lawyers she works for reject the translation of Gesellschafter of a GmbH as shareholder.

This is a good concrete example – without such examples it’s really impossible to discuss why some lawyers don’t like some translations (see earlier entry without examples).

It would be great if people asked their English-speaking lawyers why they don’t like the translation.

So, let’s look at this. Gesellschaft itself is a problem, but at least my favourite translation of GmbH, which is GmbH, is straightforward (until the client complains).

But the word Gesellschafter has to be translated. The nearest equivalents (not translations) of Gesellschafter in English are:

AG: shareholder
GmbH: member
KG: partner
OHG: partner

But look at this:
Aktie in AG: share
Anteil in GmbH: share

So it has become standard to translate every Gesellschafter of a limited company as a shareholder. Of course, it may seem like translatorese in a GmbH, but it seems a good solution to me. For some reason, hardly any Germans seem to have heard of the word members.

The U.S. lawyers who didn’t like shareholder apparently wanted members or partners. Members, OK, but never never never partners in a GmbH: it creates the wrong idea.

It’s been suggested to me that the lawyer familiar with two languages may simply be getting confused, and transferring the existence of two terms for shares (Aktie and Anteil) in German to a wrongly assumed existence of two terms in English.

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.

Claimant, plaintiff, pursuer / Kläger

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Parties to civil proceedings in England:
Up to 1999: plaintiff and defendant
(divorce: petitioner and respondent)
A claimant included a person claiming some benefit, for instance unemployment benefit.

From 1999 (Civil Procedure Rules)
claimant and defendant
(divorce: petitioner and respondent)
A claimant for unemployment benefit etc. (as before)

In Scotland: pursuer and defender
(divorce: petitioner and respondent)
Benefit claimant as above

Most English websites mention ‘claimant (plaintiff)’ – after all, it’s only been seven years since the change. A Google search for claimant -plaintiff site:uk produces mainly references to benefit claimants.

Here’s an exception: the claimant user guide of Her Majesty’s Courts Service.

I have previously linked to Michael Quinion on this subject. He writes of legal Latin being ‘swept away’, which seems a bit sweeping, so to speak.

I mention this because I don’t often use the word claimant to translate Kläger(in). My translations don’t just go to England, either. Do people who translate for England and the rest of the UK use claimant? Do translators for the EU and the European Court of Justice? I think maybe only sometimes. And I remember in 2000 or 2001 asking a British publisher client whether I was now to use claimant, and getting the answer ‘When it’s appropriate’, which suggested to me that the problem hadn’t even filtered through.