Transblawg

I summarized a number of small German-English law dictionaries some time ago. Here's another one, by Karin Linhart: Wörterbuch Recht, Beck Verlag.

Now a review of this dictionary, in German, by Christine Haselwarter, has appeared in the ADÜ Nord Infoblatt, 2/2010, available online as a PDF at www.adue-nord.de.

As I've said before, I don't think these small dictionaries are so useful for translators, because there are bigger ones available and there is a limit to the number one wants to consult. But they are an ideal size to be carried in a bag, for instance by law students.

This seems to me - on a cursory inspection - a good and reliable dictionary from US legal English into German. It has a number of Infokästchen - boxes on a grey background with extra information - very popular with students and with the review too. For instance, on contingency fees (only US), punitive damages, zealous lawyer (seems to be a US term), jurisdiction (US only) and many more. There are frequent references to US terms that are not translated into German, but cited and explained. In the DE>EN direction, there are fewer boxes.

There is extra material at the end, for example ten rules on how German lawyers should behave 'im englisch-sprachigen Ausland'. Here I note that Karin Linhart is familiar with US law and South African law, but I don't know how far her rules apply to all common-law countries. For example, there is no need to use euphemisms when looking for the loo in the UK - in fact, it might be counter-productive. I have my doubts about South Africa too, but I've never been there ('Fragen Sie niemals nach der "Toilet"!).

So without doing a proper full review, I would just like to say I think this dictionary should be seen in an American context, and I think that's what very many German law students want in any case.

There is another book by Karin Linhart, Englische Rechtssprache - Ein Studien- und Arbeitsbuch. I really must say I have no idea why the book is so huge - A4 with thick paper. The paper may be because one's supposed to write the answers on it. The nice thing about this book is that it really is full of exercises, with fairly short introductions. It has suggested solutions in the back. Many books on English for lawyers, at least those written for lawyers, have pages and pages of reading and only short exercises, if any. For those who want the terminology first and learn vocabulary in this way, this is an attractive volume. There are many English-German lists and comments on vocabulary too. The book is based on Karin Linhart's work with students at Würzburg University. (Incidentally, there is a small section on Office Language, quite useful I think, with terms like paperclip, stapler, ring binder, hole punch - this EN>DE list possibly explains the presence of some of the terms the ADÜ dictionary reviewer found superfluous).

LATER NOTE: Richard Schreiber has an entry on this dictionary at the Übersetzerportal.

There is a new edition of the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English available, 24 euros for the paperback. Here is a PDF workbook which gives a good impression of the contents.

According to the John Benjamins Book Gazette, the new edition has 20% more material. It looks to me as if it has much more information on BE/AmE differences.

I had meanwhile gone over to the Oxford Collocations Dictionary. (amazon lets you look inside). That seems larger, and it has some pages summarizing differences which might be useful for foreign learners. In the middle, it also has some workbook pages it describes as 'photocopiable', which I suppose means free to use in class without copyright considerations.

Since I only use these books occasionally to get an idea for a verb combination, I appreciate the fact that I have found them both reliable and full.

The first edition used to be available online, but if anyone is looking for an online collocations dictionary (the search words that most frequently bring people to this site), Mark Davies' page at Brigham Young University is the way to go.

As for German collocations, if you search for a word in DWDS, it will show you some collocations too.

Sascha Stocker Legal English Dictionary - you might have seen this mentioned in a comment to an earlier entry. Sascha Stocker is a Swiss lawyer who has just started putting a DE-EN-DE dictionary of Swiss legal language online. I haven't had much time to look at it so can't say much (I am being subjected to various therapies in Teletubby country near Lake Constance). Contributions are possible and will be vetted by the author. Today there are 545 terms in the dictionary, but it is growing, and there's a forum there too.

It would be great to have such a dictionary, although a German-Swiss one would do just as well. I use a variety of books - see earlier entry on Swiss German dictionaries.

I am just looking at the very beginning: Absicht and Vorsatz both translated as intention. That is quite correct. However, there are times in criminal law where a distinction has to be made. Vorsatz and intention are very wide terms, whereas Absicht is like the English specific intention. That's why legal German (not just Swiss) has two terms - because they have two meanings. You might be convicted of murder under English law although your intention (mens rea) was developed only a second before the act, in a fight. But if you planned a murder, it would be a case of specific intention / intent.

That's not really a criticism, just a comment.

Translegal has put a learner's dictionary of law online. The price is € 19.95 per year (corrected). There are 2,500 entries and there will be more.

Details of the dictionary show the editor as Matt Firth, who is British and educated in English and French law and English as a foreign language (to use an overbroad term), and has been involved in teaching English to foreign lawyers for many years now. There are also seven authors and a senior consultant, all highly qualified.

If you click on one of the words in the dictionary, you can see a definition and a warning that in order to see the full entry you need to pay the one-year licence fee. I haven't done this yet, although I probably will.

The dictionary does look excellent. My quibbles are minor and follow below.

First of all, there is a page online comparing the entry for decree in Black's Law Dictionary and in the Learn's Dictionary of Law: go to this page and click on See the difference!

Now, I never succeed in convincing people that Black's Law Dictionary is not the answer to all their problems. In my opinion it is far too wide and vague to be relied on. But it has improved since the seventh edition, the first one edited by Bryan Garner. I do think it is very deceptive advertising of TransLegal to quote the sixth or earlier edition on decree. But that edition too had a great reputation, and I think this quote shows the kind of old-fashioned and confused definition Black's has always been full of (probably par for the course when it first came out) and of which there is distinctly less since Garner took over.

Having said that, the extract from the Learner's Dictionary shows many sentence examples. The dictionary is apparently based on a number of concordances, but I imagine that many of the example sentences are not from corpora but invented as teaching material. Any student required to write legal English is going to need this kind of thing and this dictionary makes it available at the time it's needed.

I have a minor quibble on the note that decree to mean judgment is considered rather outdated, but in the US it is used for a divorce decree. But it's used in the UK for divorce decree too! I do not know if the dictionary contains a lot of UK/US distinctions, but they are clearly a problem. I think lawyers will probably learn mainly UK or mainly US usage when they are studying in or about those countries, and not from a learner's dictionary - perhaps a big reference work is needed to consult occasionally, but I don't think that exists. In a recent comment, Matt Firth made a remark about teaching UK/US legal English that also relativizes the issue, although I don't think I see things exactly the same way he does, but it would take ages to explain.

Two final points: 1) TransLegal call this the world's first learner's Legal English dictionary:

Our research methods ensure that not only is this the world's first learner's Legal English dictionary, but it is also the only dictionary of law that is based entirely on corpora to define and illustrate contemporary International Legal English in use.

As I said, I don't believe 'based entirely on corpora', but that is the way publishers always describe books. 'Based on corpora' would do for me. And the world's first learner's Legal English dictionary, as far as I know, was published by Peter Collin. It was even taken up by Pons and republished in Germany as Fachwörterbuch Recht, with German terminology interspersed, but not intended to be a bilingual dictionary. I described it here and here. The TransLegal dictionary looks a lot better than that. I always thought the Pons version of the Collin dictionary was very useful for students, but my students did not agree, and a large number of them seemed to think they were getting a bilingual dictionary (which the cover unfortunately supported by stating 'Englisch-Deutsch Deutsch-Englisch') - there was a little German index at the back - thus judging it by criteria its authors never intended.

2) I just wonder how useful it is to have a dictionary that is only online, not available as a book or even CD. But as long as there's an internet connection in the classroom, OK. My students would carry small law dictionaries around with them and consult them when something came up. The dictionary has to be at hand at the time when you need it. But it would not fit into TransLegal's business model, I imagine, to publish a book.

Under the heading Zwei Langenscheidt-Wörterbücher speziell für Schweizer, Blogwiese points out, as I have noticed before, that titles can be misleading.

The two dictionaries are the Schweizer Wörterbuch Englisch and the Schweizer Wörterbuch Französisch.

Dritter Versuch, sowohl im Englischen als auch im Französischen Wörterbuch schlage ich „Bord“ nach. Klar, das „Bücherbord“, und auch „an Bord gehen“ finden sich sofort, aber die spezifisch Schweizerische Bedeutung „Bord“ = „Böschung, Abhang“? Keine Chance. Dabei ist die sogar im Duden verzeichnet.

My suspicion is that these are school dictionaries to be sold in Switzerland.

When it comes to Swiss law, I have a few references here, although they don't always do the trick. There is Metzger's monolingual Schweizerisches juristisches Wörterbuch, which often disappoints but sometimes gives statutory references that are useful.

Then there is Piermarco Zen-Ruffinen's Petit Lexique Juridique, DE>FR.

Another possibility is the Doucet-Fleck DE>FR law dictionary (CD-ROM here), which doesn't purport to be Swiss but does contain Swiss and Austrian terms.

Just occasionally, the Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen is helpful. I have a colleague in England who hates it, and it helped me most when I was translating contracts for snow cannons in Bolzano.

The old Duden general-language Was sagt man in der Schweiz has now been succeeded by Kurt Meyer's Schweizer Wörterbuch.

One certainly cannot count on finding terms in any of these, and none of them is DE>EN.

Kluwer publishes an Introduction to Swiss Law (it may be possible to look into this on Google Books too). Also useful are purely German books: Forstmoser and Ogorek, Juristisches Arbeiten. Eine Anleitung für Studierende, and Kleiner Merkur, edited by Conrad Meyer and Rolf Moosmann. There's also Martina Wittibschlagers Einführung in das schweizerische Recht in Beck Verlag (1st ed. out of print, 2nd ed. expected in September).

Finally, LLRX.com has materials on Swiss law and many other systems in English, not quite up to date, but not to be sneezed at either.

Simon at Omniglot reports that Dwelly's Gaelic Dictionary is now online. Not only that, but there are plans to update it.

The copy of Dwelly's Illustrated Gaelic to English Dictionary I have (I don't speak Gaelic, but when I was investigating Europe-wide cuts of meat it was recommended to me) is dated 1994. There aren't that many illustrations, but they are useful. For instance, under breacan an fhéilidh there are pictures of the traditional belted plaid (the kilt being an English invention - see OUPBlog today). Diagrams of meat cuts are under closach - but no graphics online (yet?).

I once mentioned the Merriam-Webster online visual dictionary.

There's now a German-English version online, the same material apparently.

This is provided by Pons.

The FTD article on Leo I mentioned recently also referred to the Pons free-of-charge dictionary that has been online since October 2008. It has a section called Open Dictionary to which registered users can contribute. The company hopes this will encourage print sales.

The FTD has an article on Leo (= Link Everything Online) and Hans Riethmayer, the computer scientist who founded it at Munich Technical University in 1992.

Leo left the university and became a GmbH in 2006. Maybe that was when it removed its pages from Google linking.

The Financial Times Deutschland is interested in new businesses that succeed where traditional businesses fail. Leo earns 500,000 euros per year if all its banner advertising is taken.

The quality has improved.

Heute schenken Nutzer ihnen Vokabeln. Eine Tunnelbaufirma schickt ihr Glossar, der Verband der Nähmaschinenindustrie seine Fachbegriffe, nun kennt die Seite auch Stichmuster auf Englisch. Riethmayer hat Übersetzer eingestellt, die alle neuen Begriffe prüfen. "Zugegeben, unsere Qualität war am Anfang mäßig, weil Informatiker sich um die Inhalte gekümmert haben. Aber wir wurden immer besser." Und die Rivalen immer unruhiger.

What I find interesting are the discussions about problem words. Click on Forum at the top left to find them. Or if you enter a problem word, you will get links to previous discussions. Here is a discussion on Hundekotaufnahmepflicht.

Of course, you have to work out whether to trust the suggestions.

(Thanks to Herbert for the link)

Langenscheidt has a series of joky little dictionaries, now with the addition of one on German legalese: Anwalt-Deutsch Deutsch-Anwalt

There is a lesson on legalese online:

Sprachkurs Juristendeutsch

Sie finden es ganz großartig, wie Ihr Anwalt sich ausdrückt? Sie würden auch gerne so toll formulieren können? Kein Problem - mit unserem kleinen Sprachkurs Juristendeutsch!

Nehmen wir zunächst einen ganz gewöhnlichen Text, wie er nur einem gedanklich einfach gestrickten Nichtjuristen einfallen könnte:

Sie zahlen seit drei Monaten keine Miete. Wir sind die Anwälte von Herrn Müller und warnen Sie: Wenn Sie die 1.500 Euro bis zum 15. Dezember nicht überwiesen haben, wird Herr Müller Ihnen fristlos kündigen!
Niemals würde man solche Sätze in einem Anwaltsbrief lesen! Juristisch korrekt werden sie erst, wenn man einige Regeln beherzigt.

With the help of five rules, the final legalese version reads as follows:

Sehr geehrter Herr Schmitz,
wir zeigen Ihnen gegenüber hiermit unter anwaltlicher Versicherung ordnungsgemäßer Bevollmächtigung und unter Hinweis auf die in Kopie anliegende Vertretungsvollmacht die Übernahme der gerichtlichen wie außergerichtlichen anwaltlichen Beratung und Vertretung unseres Mandanten Peter Müller in sämtlichen mietvertragsrechtlichen Angelegenheiten an. Grund unserer Einschaltung ist der Umstand, dass unsere Mandantschaft im Zusammenhang mit dem zwischen Ihnen als Mieter und unserer Mandantschaft als Vermieter am 01.06.2002 geschlossenen Mietvertrag über die in der Schillerstraße 5, 12345 Musterstadt, 3. Obergeschoss links gelegenen Wohnmieträume die Feststellung treffen musste, dass Ihrerseits bislang auf die zum 01.05., 01.06. und 01.07.2008 fällig gewordenen monatlichen Mietzinsraten an unsere Mandantschaft keinerlei Zahlungsleistungen erfolgt sind, weshalb wir von dieser nunmehr beauftragt wurden, Sie unter letztmaliger und nicht weiter verlängerbarer Fristsetzung bis zum 15.12.2008 zur Vermeidung einer andernfalls durch uns namens und im Auftrag unserer Mandantschaft ohne weitere Vorwarnung auszusprechenden fristlosen, außerordentlichen Kündigung des zwischen Ihnen und unserer Mandantschaft bestehenden, oben näher bezeichneten Wohnraummietverhältnisses aufzufordern, die aufgelaufenen, rückständigen Mietzinszahlungen auf das Ihnen bekannte Bankkonto unserer Mandantschaft bei der Sparkasse Brotzingen, BLZ 123 456 78, Kontonummer 987 654 321 ungekürzt zur Anweisung zu bringen.

I don't know if this dictionary is useful for translators. It might be, or it might be too trivializing.

(Via Handakte WebLAWg)

The following is all in Portuguese. Even if you don't read Portuguese, download the dictionary sample (see below), which contains pages from and into English. It looks excellent.

Fabio M. Said praises Marcílio Moreira de Castro's English-Portuguese-English law dictionary (dictionary of law, economics and accounting).

It is only available on paper and has to be bought from the author, who is in Brazil.

Fabio is impressed with the use of monolingual references as sources and the relative lack of non-specialist terms (which often take up disproportionate space in specialist dictionaries).

A PDF sample can be downloaded.

The author has a blog on legal translation.

wordia is a new internet dictionary where users can contribute video clips containing definitions.

The organizers work together with HarperCollins, the National Trust, the Open University and Michael Birch of bebo.com. You have to belong to youtube to post videos there.

It looks to me as if it could have started at the Edinburgh Festival.

The word of the day is alopecia.

The von Beseler - Jacobs-Wüstefeld law dictionary can still be bought, at a price.
EN>DE 1986, DE>EN 1991

I have the latter and find it useful, although most of the time I leave it aside and turn to Dietl and Romain. Not that von Beseler is not as good, but one or two dictionaries are enough in number/desk space. However, von Beseler gives a very large selection of terms to consider. Its layout has always been superb (I have the previous edition too).

Amazon offers 'Search inside', but none of the alphabetical pages are there!

However, the dictionary can be found in Google Books, and although not every page is open to consult, you might certainly have some luck with terms. (Mind you, it would be quicker to find terminology elsewhere).

This is only of interest to non-native speakers of German like me.

I encountered the word sächlich in a sense I had never met before. Sachlich usually means objective, and sächlich means neuter, as in masculine/feminine/neuter.

This was in section 32 (6) sentence 1 of the Einkommensteuergesetz (Income Tax Act):

Bei der Veranlagung zur Einkommensteuer wird für jedes zu berücksichtigende Kind des Steuerpflichtigen ein Freibetrag von 1.824 Euro für das sächliche Existenzminimum des Kindes (Kinderfreibetrag) sowie ein Freibetrag von 1.080 Euro für den Betreuungs- und Erziehungs- oder Ausbildungsbedarf des Kindes vom Einkommen abgezogen.

I realize that Existenzminimum (subsistence level) is neuter, but that's obviously not what it means. I couldn't find it in the multi-volume Duden dictionary (which tends to exclude specialist terminology). The Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch (which I had forgotten to add to my sidebar) hasn't reached S yet. But I do have a link to the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS), and there it was:

sächlich /Adj./
1. Gramm. ein s. Substantiv, ein Substantiv mit s. Geschlecht (ein mit dem Artikel 'das' verbundenes Substantiv); der s. Artikel (der Artikel 'das'); dieses Nomen ist s., wird s. gebraucht
2. fachspr. einen materiellen Gegenstand betreffend: die personellen und s. Verwaltungskosten; die s. Voraussetzungen des naturwissenschaftlichen Schulunterrichts sind verbessert worden; Die Kosten der sächlichen Unterhaltung [der Arbeitsbibliotheken] und der personellen Kräfte tragen die Räte der Kreise Gesetzblatt DDR 1956
dazu haupt-, neben-, tat-, ursächlich

Fantastic! I went with 'material'.

Can anyone in the USA or Canada lend this dictionary urgently to Teresa?

Here's her comment under my earlier entry.

If you can, contact her via the comment link.

I am looking for a copy of this Bucksch dictionary ENG-->GER for a job I am currently working on. Would pay for all shipping (US or Canada only) plus a fee. Returned next week (22nd).
ATA-member in good standing; reliable!

Thanks for any pointers (I talked to Kater-Verlag, where I usually get my dicos; they can't deliver this week.)

Merriam-Webster VISUAL DICTIONARY Online



(via languagehat)