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Transblawg | 30. März 2012 —The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law has finally appeared. (That is a link to OUP, where you can also see some of the material). You can see the table of contents and more at Peter Tiersma's website - which I recommend in general if you don't already know it. I was particularly interested in the …
Transblawg | 28. März 2012 —This was a great seminar on legal English and contract law given by Stuart Bugg, who is a NZ and English lawyer (he was born in Yorkshire, which I didn't know) and run by the Regensburg section of the BDÜ. It was on March 24th and lasted all day. Actually I have stopped writing up seminars, because …
Transblawg | 13. März 2012 —I'm a bit late in recognizing the new abbreviation of the Court of Justice of the European Union, CJEU, rather than the earlier ECJ. There's a useful document in the House of Commons Library - Standard Note SN/IA/3689: The European Union: a guide to terminology, procedures and sources, last updated …
Transblawg | 8. März 2012 —Mark Liberman at Language Log has once again, in two posts, discussed the use of corpora in US courts. I've previously mentioned how translators might use a corpus to analyse specialist vocabulary. We do something a bit like that every time we use a search engine to see if an English term is used mo…
Transblawg | 28. Januar 2012 —There was a query on Proz this week on a topic I remember once discussing on u-forum: when you translate a judgment from German to English, how do you indicate that part of it is in reported speech? I basically agreed with the solution in this case, although it wasn't quite what I would do (using wo…
Transblawg | 13. Januar 2012 —Here's a curious question from an ITI member. This is the interpreter's oath, which is taken by all interpreters in courts in England: I swear by Almighty God that I will well and faithfully interpret and make true explanation of all such matters and things as shall be required of me according t…
Transblawg | 6. Dezember 2011 —When Germans talk in German about Body Mass Index, they always pronounce it Mahss, like the German word for measure or litre of beer. I have found this odd, but it occurred to me that they aren't actually saying the English word (mass like German Masse), but have converted it into a new German term …
Transblawg | 23. November 2011 —The Volokh Conspiracy has a post on A Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States: Gene Fidell (Yale Law School) and some of his students are putting together an article tentatively titled A Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States, which will basical…
Transblawg | 22. Oktober 2011 — From the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors: Qaddafi, Muammar /Muhammed al-) (b. 1942) Libyan leader - use Qaddāfī in specialist texts; not Gadafi, Gadhdhafi, Qadafy, Gaddafi (although preferred by The Times), Gadaffi See also As a Linguist ... on Wait, who just died? It’s been all ove…
Transblawg | 29. Juli 2011 — (I drafted this entry before I read about the Utah Court) I recently ‘attended’ a webinar about how translators can use corpora to investigate their target language. I’ve been fascinated by corpora since I first encountered the Collins Cobuild English dictionary when I was teaching English – I thin…
Transblawg | 20. Juli 2011 —Mark Liberman at Language Log cites a Utah court that has relied on corpus linguistics. It was necessary to define the word custody in connection with a child, and some of the dictionary definitions were irrelevant. He cites Gordon Smith at Conglomerate: Today, my former colleague and current Utah…
Transblawg | 19. Juni 2011 —Here is a press release of Saarbrücken University which I feel I ought to report. It appeared in the FAZ recently too. Bei der Lektüre von Geschäftsberichten deutscher Unternehmen trifft man auf viele englische Begriffe. Damit verstoßen die Firmen vermutlich gegen das Aktien- und Handelsgesetz,…
Transblawg | 17. Juni 2011 —John Wells has a blog entry on how English words are pronounced when they turn up in German texts. (Yesterday he had one on the Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch, which was too heavy for me). It's quite a puzzle. There was a sweet bar called Twix that was renamed Raider (pronounced rider) and then back…
Transblawg | 16. Juni 2011 —It's well known that interpreters can't always translate jokes. But this video clip is a good illustration of how little non-linguists understand the problem. The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop...and says 'Can you make me one with everything?' Needless to say, this did not come across. TV hosts …
Transblawg | 14. Juni 2011 —Adam Liptak in the New York Times: In a decision last week in a patent case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. puzzled out the meaning of a federal law by consulting the usual legal materials — and five dictionaries. One of the words he looked up was “of.” He learned that it means pretty much …
Transblawg | 15. März 2010 —A colleague today received some translations as reference material and was surprised to see they capitalized 'claimant' and 'defendant'. Is this corre…
Transblawg | 12. Mai 2010 —As reported in an earlier entry, hearings in English are now possible at three international commercial chambers in Aachen, Cologne and Bonn. Both par…
Transblawg | 13. Juli 2009 —No, not ruminations on this interesting topic, but a Translators Association workshop on the topic, on 29th July, in London I presume. In many langu…
Transblawg | 26. Januar 2010 —Günther Oettinger is Germany's new European Commissioner and he thinks we should all understand English. He doesn't seem able to pronounce the English…
Transblawg | 25. August 2010 —Here is another of those words that might have a different meaning in the UK and Germany - Google gives German sites with both meanings. BBC News: Fak…
Transblawg | 18. September 2009 —There are conventional German equivalents of numerous fixed expressions in English legalese. Dietl-Lorenz, for example, has: in witness whereof I ha…
Transblawg | 5. Februar 2009 —I gather that the open source mapping community is using the new English word motorroad to mean a highway with motorway-type access restrictions. I ju…
Transblawg | 25. Mai 2010 —Since I wrote on this topic, at least two weblogs have taken it up, and there are comments on the entries. And last week there was an article in Die Z…