Translating court names/"Bundesgerichtshof" auf Englisch

Translating court names is a complex matter. So here is just one court name to discuss. In a newspaper article reporting on a decision of the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) or the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG), you wouldn't need to use the German name. Bundesgerichtshof is usually translated as Federal Court of Justice. That is the term recommended by the Auswärtiges Amt. I don't think we actually have to use their recommendations if they're no good, but this one has a history and is widely used. One source of court name recommendations, plus diagram, is a PDF file on the Bundesjustizministerium site. And here is a page at the Auswärtiges Amt with terminology PDFs, including Deutsche Gerichtsbezeichnungen und ihre Übersetzungen in zehn Sprachen - German court names translated into ten languages (they also have a nice file on civil service terms). I commented in an earlier entry that one of the IPKAT writers used German Supreme Court. In the comments, Birgit said that German Federal Court of Justice and German Federal Supreme Court are both commonly used for BGH, but for her, the former sounds like the Bundesverfassungsgericht (recommended translation: Federal Constitutional Court) and therefore confuses the reader. The fact that there is later a reference to the Regional Court of Berlin suggests that District Court is indeed being used for the Amtsgericht. The opposite seems true to me. To me, Supreme Court immediately reminds me of the Supreme Court of the USA, which is like the BGH and the BVerfG combined. If anything, Supreme Court makes me think of the Bundesverfassungsgericht. The only problem I have with Federal Court of Justice is that it doesn't immediately communicate a meaning. And of course, the word federal might confuse someone in the USA, where there are both state and federal legal systems and the distinction is different from the distinction in Germany. I had a look at a BGH decision last week which was widely reported in English newspapers. It was a decision that euthanasia could be acceptable in certain circumstances (the word euthanasia is associated in Germany with a euphemism used in the Third Reich, so Sterbehilfe is preferred). If you do a Google search on German court euthanasia you can see a number of articles referring to the BGH. Examples: A top German court ... the Federal Court of Justice (BBC) Germany's federal high court ... the federal court of justice ... Germany's highest civil court (Irish Times) Germany's Federal Court of Justice ... the federal tribunal (physorg.com) The only reference to Supreme Court I could find was in an older article which actually meant the Bundesverfassungsgericht. However, stories like these can usually be traced back to one dpa report, so the results may be biased. The situation is complicated, of course, by the fact that England now has a Supreme Court, formerly the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, which is pretty close to the BGH in function, although the Court of Appeal deal …