Monthly Archives: August 2012

Summer digest

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In case any readers have been away for the summer (lucky you!), here is a digest of some key posts in the last month or so, divided into categories.

You can also browse the blog by using the category list in the left-hand sidebar, or the monthly archives.

Conference reports

Guest posts

Resources

Miscellaneous

Tweaking the look of WordstoDeeds

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A few readers have written to me about difficulties reading the blog. On the other hand, others have written in with compliments about its appearance.

After some digging around, I discovered that it depends on which computer you are using, which browser, and even which version of that browser!
However, I would like to try to please all of the people all of the time 😉 and so…

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Life as a rural court interpreter

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Today’s guest post is by Kathleen Shelly, a Spanish/English certified court interpreter and translator working in Delaware and Maryland in the United States. It was also published last week by NAJIT (the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators), of which Kathleen is a highly respected and senior member.

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Monday smiles – Alternative Dispute Resolution the Old-Fashioned Way: Rock, Paper, Scissors

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November 22nd, 2011

One-third of the way toward resolving lawyer disputes.
Fed up with wrangling lawyers, U.S. District Judge Gregory A. Presnell (M.D. Fla.) came up with a novel dispute resolution procedure: the game of “rock, paper, scissors.”

In what Judge Presnell called “the latest in a series of Gordian knots that the parties have been unable to untangle” without court assistance, the parties were unable to agree on a location for a deposition.

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Short seminars at the London Language Show

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The upcoming Language Show Live 2012, to be held from 19-21 October at London’s Olympia,  is the UK’s largest language event and the show for those who offer products and services to language teachers, learners, translators, linguists, language professionals and businesses.

Short seminars are being run throughout the three days. Below is a selection that might be of interest to readers. The full list is available here.

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Reporting from Canterbury – Part 2

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I hope you will enjoy this second post on the conference “Comparative Law: Engaging Translation”, once again, a subjective selection that may be of interest to you. You can find the first post here.

Asst. Prof. Cornelis Baaij, University of Amsterdam

Legal translation and the ‘Contamination’ of Comparative Legal research

As you can see from the title, Cornelis Baaij talked about the translator as a contaminant. Before the translators reading this start preparing to lynch him 🙂 I must add a caveat – he was talking about a very specific situation – the context of comparative legal research.

In brief, Baaij argues that a target-oriented approach to legal translation in the above case is not useful – that any efforts on the part of the translator to “tailor-make” the text for its audience will hinder the comparative lawyer in their task of understanding a foreign legal system. He therefore advances a literal approach – exposing the “foreignness” of the text.

Whether you agreed with his propos or not, it was certainly a very stimulating talk!

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Reporting from Canterbury – Part 1

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Today I offer you my report on the conference “Comparative Law: Engaging Translation” that took place at Kent Law School, Canterbury, UK from 21-22 June 2012.

The conference brought together many highly eminent speakers, and included a host of different perspectives and disciplines.

The conference’s main assumption was that “the question of comparative law is through and through one of translation”.

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WeBiText – another translation search engine

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Today I’d like to tell you about a tool called WeBiText, under development at the National Research Council of Canada. It is quite similar to Linguee, a review of which I posted last week – it searches a corpus and provides parallel extracts of translations. WeBiText can produce results for 30 languages, including a few unusual ones such as Inuktitut, Haitian Creole and Welsh.

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CJEU rules on ‘IP translator’ as a UK trade mark

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An interesting landmark case today…

On 16 October 2009, the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) applied to register the designation ‘IP TRANSLATOR’ as a UK trade mark. To identify the services covered by that registration the CIPA used the heading of Class 41 of the Nice Classification which includes translation but is called ‘Education; providing of training; entertainment; sporting and cultural activities’.

The UK Intellectual Property Office refused the application, stating that the class description included ‘translation services’. The proposed trade mark would thus have lacked distinctive character and been descriptive in nature, too similar to the class description itself.

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20 tips for lawyers working with interpreters

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I’m sure lawyers taking depositions from deponents speaking other languages, especially when travel to foreign countries is required, are fully aware of the logistic costs involved, and wish to get the best results from interpreters working with them. This post was originally written for journalists working with interpreters, but I felt strongly that it applied so well to the legal context that it was worth sharing with you all.

Of course one or two of the items would generally not apply in a deposition context, such as giving the deponent the option to speak a language other than their own (tip n° 10), but the vast majority of the points mentioned would improve things dramatically in my experience!

Perhaps the key thing to take away is that by making the efforts below you are not ‘making the interpreter’s job easier’ but making your communication more effective, and, ultimately, getting a better result.

See what you think… 

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