Transblawg

Nick Clegg speaking Dutch, about 1 min. 44 into the clip. OK, his mother is Dutch and he was brought up to speak both Dutch and English (as when he refers to a 'turn-off'). I wouldn't mind hearing him speak another language.

The Evening Standard looked into Clegg's family history in 2007.

Ukulele & Languages is a blog by a Frenchwoman married to a Norwegian (does the ukulele playing come via Norway?). Some ukulele videos.

Via Ukulelia

There are a number of sites on the Web that list translation weblogs.

The Polyglot blog has just published its updated long list. What language the blogs are in is not always clear, but it's easy to click through and check.

Recently, mygengo.com has been adding a page for each of a number of translation weblogs. Here's the list, and here is the page for Transblawg. This list might be an easier place to start, as it's growing but not yet as long as the Polyglot one.

As far as my blog is concerned, they have definitely made the effort of reading it and actually point out that a knowledge of German would be useful (because I don't translate all the German I quote and some of my links are German). They also have tags like 'German' so one can narrow down the list, and they supply an RSS link, for example, for each blog.

Learn to speak a bit of Gothic on Youtube.

via languagehat

I've mentioned Stenography before. Today Jack Schofield shows there is also Palantyping, in answer to this question:

I attended a gathering in Richmond Theatre, at which the then mayor and members of the Greater London Authority were available for public questioning. It was very impressive that their words almost immediately appeared on a screen courtesy of a voice recognition system. How is it done?

Geoffrey Pullum was relieved that alle bagage is gelost does not mean all luggage has been lost.

Meanwhile, Sally, at No Hard Chords, finds that there are advantages to hearing The Three Bells in the original French - especially if you don't understand the language:

Listening to a song in an unfamiliar language can be freeing. For me, bad lyrics can render an otherwise great song unlistenable. But as long as the singer, the production and the melody work, foreign-language lyrics can be clunky or insipid or cliched with me none the wiser. If an English-language version of the song is recorded with bad lyrics, though, a puzzle emerges: were the lyrics this poor in the original or did the poetry get lost in translation?

(Here are the Browns).

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 see that John DeFrancis died on January 2, 2009, and that he had an exciting life (via languagehat).

Biography:

John DeFrancis, emeritus professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii, began his career in Chinese immediately after graduating from Yale in 1933 by spending three years studying and traveling in China. Apart from academic study, his learning experience included grassroots contact with the language and people in the course of a 4,000-mile trip in Northwest China and Mongolia that involved trekking 1,000 miles across the Gobi Desert by camel and floating 1,200 miles down the Yellow River on an inflated sheepskin raft.

It was his books that were used in class when I learnt Chinese. I started in 1969, when they were fairly new, and went through the three sets of three volumes (basic text plus character text and reader) in evening classes, first at Holborn College in Red Lion Square. We eventually did the Cambridge O Level and A Level exams, which unlike the London exams were intended for non-native speakers, so instead of four novels at A Level we did something like four short stories or extracts from longer books. I think I still have the books somewhere in Upminster. We did a story by Lu Xun, can't remember which, and something by Ba Jin.

Later I attended courses in my spare time at Cologne University (classical poetry) and Bonn University (where the diplomats studied). But I never made the leap to fast reading or real fluency, although I reached the point where it would not have been hard.

The DeFrancis books fascinated me with their setting in a world quite unlike Chairman Mao's China, a world where a young American student could strike up a friendship with a young Chinese student in Beijing.

Our teacher was Derek Bryan, who had left the diplomatic service after his sympathetic view of Communism became known - I see he has made Wikipedia and didn't realize he was a friend of Donald Maclean's, nor that he helped resolve the Yangtze Incident (he was in China from 1933 to 1943). Derek wasn't a Communist - he was a Quaker - and he was an ideal person to introduce China. One problem, however, was that he too often corrected DeFrancis, saying 'you wouldn't say it that way' - I had the feeling that we should rely on the book slightly more and find out for ourselves later what was more natural. Another problem of learning Chinese was the big gap between the vocabulary of Mao and the People's Daily, and everything published in China, and literature, because every unfamiliar character took such a long time to look up.

I see that Derek and DeFrancis were born in 1910 and 1911, but Derek died in 2003, so he only reached the age of 92 (perhaps I should brush up my Chinese again).

DeFrancis's books were more approachable than the ones from China, which at that time were also heavily politicized. I see most of them have been revised - here is a list of his books.

Derek Bryan: obituary in the Guardian; remarks on a visit to China in 1999.

Proponents of Proposition 8 in California, 'Eliminates the Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry', want it changed to 'Limit on Marriage'. They think the verb 'eliminates' is negative and not typical of titles of legislation in California.

Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley said 'There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial about transitive verbs, and the Court is not willing to fashion a rule that would require the Attorney General to engage in useless nominalization'.

Advocates of same-sex marriage were pleased with the decision.

I suppose one should keep an eye open for future transitive verbs, and make sure that there is no further nominalization.

(via Roger Shuy at Language Log)

Via LAWgical:

Bernd Schmitz (multimedia blog) found the general terms of business of 1 & 1 as a potential ISP heavy going and had the idea of creating a word cloud from them at Wordle.



I tried the same thing with Virgin broadband terms and conditions (UK):



I suppose a contrast between two English or two German sets might be more interesting.

Superficially, I note that the English contract is addressed to you, not that the word springs to the eye in the cloud, whereas the German is in the third person, hence der Kunde (the customer). Also, the German has portmanteau words like Mindestvertragslaufzeit (minimum contract term) (and more abbreviations than the English, such as z.B. and ggf, the former with a full stop in the middle and the latter without). The German berechtigt and verpflichtet match the English may and must (no shall here). Might be worth thinking about when translating from one to the other, although one doesn't always want to do a complete adaptation.

Judge Alex Kozinski and Eugene Volokh on the use of Yiddish in court decisions:

Searching through the LEXIS legal opinions database reveals that "chutzpah" (sometimes also spelled "chutzpa," "hutzpah," or "hutzpa") has appeared in 231 reported court decisions. Curiously, all but eleven of them have been filed since 1980. There are two possible explanations for this. One is that during the last 21 years there has been a dramatic increase in the actual amount of chutzpah in the United States--or at least in the U.S. legal system. This explanation seems possible, but unlikely.

The more likely explanation is that Yiddish is quickly supplanting Latin as the spice in American legal argot. As recently as 1970, a federal court not only felt the need to define "bagels"; it misdefined them, calling them "hard rolls shaped like doughnuts." All right-thinking people know good bagels are rather soft. (Day-old bagels are rather hard, but right-thinking people do not eat day-olds, even when they are only 10 cents each.) We’ve come a long way since then.

Mind you, there's no comparison with US language outside lawsuits.

This is a 1993 article, Lawsuit, Shmawsuit, available online.

(Via Ruth Morris, who writes on Interpreting in legal contexts and Interpreting in the Israel legal system - and has published on the same topic in England and Wales)

There must be a lot of errors made with search-and-replace on newspapers. But somehow I seem only to read about the PC ones.

For instance, Tyson Gay is not called Tyson Homosexual.

I also recall reading of Nelson Mandela referred to as an Afro-American.

Rechtsanwalt Jens Hänsch, Dresden, compared part of an Austrian judgment he received with its German equivalent. I shamelessly reproduce both:

Was in Deutschland hieße

1. Der Beklagte wird verurteilt, an die Klägerin 1.144,50 Euro zuzüglich Zinsen in Höhe von 9,47 % seit dem 10.04.2006 zu zahlen.
2. Der Beklagte hat die Kosten des Rechtsstreits zu tragen.
3. Das Urteil ist vorläufig vollstreckbar.

heißt Im Namen der Republik wie folgt:

Die beklagte Partei ist schuldig, der klagenden Partei den Betrag von € 1.144,50 samt Zinsen in Höhe von 9,47 % seit 10.04.2006 sowie die Prozesskosten gemäß § 19a RAO zu Handen der Klagsvertreter zu bezahlen, all dies binnen 14 Tagen bei sonstiger Exekution.

At least they didn't write 'samt Anhang'!

On this topic, I do wish people asking questions on translators' mailing lists would say if their text is German, Swiss or Austrian and if their audience is specifically British, American or global.

Some Germans - lawyers or translators - can write really good legal English but tend to be more Catholic than the Pope (päpstlicher als der Papst) when doing so.

I'm reminded of this by the (new) legal writer's quote in his latest entry:

“Much bad writing today comes not from the conventional sources of verbal dereliction—sloth, original sin, or native absence of mind—but from stylistic imitation. It is learned, an act of stylistic piety which imitates a single style, the bureaucratic style I have called The Official Style. This bureaucratic style dominates written discourse in our time, and beginning or harried or fearful writers adopt it as protective coloration.”

—Richard A. Lanham, Revising Prose vi (3d ed. 1992).

(This is quoted from Garner's Usage Tip of the Day, which I don't receive).

That refers to native English speakers writing English, who have less excuse, of course.

Particular features of this hyperlegalese:

use of said and aforesaid where it adds nothing

use of such instead of this/these

Here's a site that objects to it too (Alabama Legislative Reference Service):

Rule 10. Use of “Such”
Do not use “such” as a substitute for “the,” “that,” “it,” “those,” “them,” or other similar words.
Example: “The (not ‘such’) application shall be in the form the court prescribes.” Use “such” to express “for example” or “of that kind.”

overuse of shall. I quote an example from Butt and Castle on Modern Legal Drafting:

If the Vendor shall within one month of the receipt of such notice give written notice (If the Vendor ... gives would suffice)

Here is Todd Bruno of Louisiana State University, quoting Gerald Lebovits:

About said, as in aforesaid, Justice Smith asked whether one would say, "I can do with another piece of that pie, dear. Said pie is the best you've ever made." About same, he asked whether one would say, "I've mislaid my car keys. Have you seen same?" About the illiterate such, he asked whether one would say, "Sharon Kay stubbed her toe this afternoon, but such toe is all right now." About hereinafter called, he asked whether one would say, "You'll get a kick out of what happened today to my secretary, hereinafter called Cuddles." About inter alia, he asked, "Why not say, 'Among other things?' But, more important, in most instances inter alia is wholly unnecessary in that it supplies information needed only by fools .... So you not only insult your reader's intelligence but go out of your way to do it in Latin yet!"

See also the Legalese Hall of Shame.

The Guardian recently had an article entitled Digital thieves swipe your photos - and profit from them.

Pedantic readers were having none of this theft terminology. Hence yesterday's technology blog post: What's the right way to talk about copyright stuff?

The aggrieved reader wrote (in part):

"I only read the heading and subheadings of this. For god's sake, at least use the correct terminology. The photographs in question simply are not being stolen. They're being copied. No thieves in existence there, but copiers. Illegal copiers I'm sure (whether it's a good idea for so many things to be illegal to copy or not is another issue). You're not helping us nor yourselves by perpetuating this kind of BS. The party who initially has possession of the item in one case no longer has the item, and in the other, does. That's a big difference. That's why we have different words with very different meanings to describe the two fundamentally different situations. But you've got them mixed up. And helped other people get them mixed up too."

There is an attempt to fight a rearguard action from the legal point of view, but after all, a bit of polemic must surely be permitted, and the latter would be the better argument.

Comment by the author, Charles Arthur:

@ParkyDR @nickholmes: "A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and "thief" and "steal" shall be construed accordingly."

Surely the property here is intellectual property, which courts have construed as existing in the same way that physical property does.

The "permanent deprivation" is of the opportunity to sell it (or prevent it being sold).

The Theft Act says that property 'includes money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other intangible property' - but the things in action have to be capable of appropriation.

(Dietl: chose in action (einklagbares) Forderungsrecht; obligatorischer Anspruch (der Gegenstand einer Klage sein kann); unkörperlicher Rechtsgegenstand (Wechsel, Sparguthaben, Patente, Urheberrecht, Versicherungspolice, Rente etc))

Comment by AlexC:

As a former copyright lawyer, I think "theft" is technically the wrong word. But then most people don't understand the technical meaning of "theft", so what does it really matter?

As a matter of general practice, the term "copyright theft" has been around for quite a while - e.g. at the cinema you will see anti-piracy adverts from a group called the Federation Against Copyright Theft ("FACT").

The legal offence of copyright infringement and the legal offence of theft are so analagous that they fall within the same linguistic term "theft" in piracy-type situations.

Now, for some real fun, we could consider whether the tort of copyright infringement is analagous with the tort of conversion...