Following last week’s post on the origins of simultaneous interpreting techniques, this short video, jointly produced by the European Parliament and the United Nations, gives an insight into interpretation at these two institutions.
Yearly Archives: 2012
Monday smiles – Urgency
A couple of smiles today with kind permission from the website of law cartoons Stu’s Views.
Enjoy!
Factsheets on European Court of Human Rights case law
The Press Service at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has published a series of Factsheets on subjects ranging from data protection to trade union rights, and from detention to social welfare.
The Factsheets describe important jurisprudence at the institution and there are currently 36 available – in English, German, Russian and French.
Origins of simultaneous interpreting techniques
This fascinating video from the US Federal Judiciary Channel shows an interpreter who worked at the 1945 Nuremberg Trials describing the origins of simultaneous translation techniques.
A profusion of national law websites!
Following on from yesterday’s post, and to round off the week with a useful resource – the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne provide some excellent links on their website.
What exactly is comparative law?
Continuing with my mini-series “What exactly is…” (following on from What exactly is forensic linguistics? and What exactly is a lawyer-linguist?), today let’s take a brief look at the subject of Comparative Law.
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law* describes the discipline as “time-honoured but not easily understood in all its dimensions”. According to Michael Bogdan**, comparative law may be defined as “the comparing of different legal systems with the purpose of ascertaining the similarities and differences“.
Glossary – US Patent & Trademark Office
Knowing that quite a few translators work on patents, I thought this glossary from the United States Patent and Trademark Office might be of use.
Personally, I’m not too keen on the visual presentation of the glossary, but it certainly seems useful.
There are also a number of videos providing introductions to various procedures and terms (such as “specimen”, “applicant”, “drawing” and “basis”) used by the Office. You can access a list here. Beware – not all computers will play the videos and some of the links appear to be broken. 😦
Monday smiles – Words and letters
Today I offer you these two cartoons to cheer up your Monday morning, from Mark Anderson’s website Andertoons.
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Legal considerations – machine translation and copyright
This guest post is published under a GNU version 2 licence, and comes from the Open Translation Tools Manual (more about that in a forthcoming post). It was written by Ed Bice in 2009, with modifications by Thom Hastings also in 2009. Despite being 3 years old, I think it brings up some very interesting topics for discussion. I look forward to reading your comments!
American copyright law considers a translation a derivative work. As such translators must obtain permission from the copyright or derivative right holder of the source language text. With regard to online translation, we expect that as Machine Translation (MT) and Hybrid Distributed Translation (HDT- strategies combining human and machine translation) come of age significant changes will need to be made to the legal framework to accommodate these technologies.
Quantifying the cost of poor quality in translation – sour cherries
The Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission has made available a report written late last year, as part of the ‘Studies on translation and multilingualism’ series, on Quantifying Quality Costs and the Cost of Poor Quality in Translation. The document can be downloaded in PDF format here.
Items such as prevention of poor quality, evaluation, and clarification of original texts may be of interest to those of you procuring translation as well as to translators. Some case studies from ‘real life’ have been given. One interesting example relates to protective measures on the import of sour cherries which accidentally became “sweet cherries” in the initial German version.
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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