On the same subject as last week’s post From Louboutin to lawyer-linguists?, this guest post from Andrea Kaluzny is a tongue-in-cheek account as well as a great insight into the subject of document review, which is a particularly widespread practice in the United States. As well as being a contract attorney providing multilingual support for litigation, Andrea is committed to volunteer work in several areas including, amongst others, animal welfare and human rights.
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Tradulínguas, based in Lisbon, Portugal, and organizers since 2005 of online training and webinars, as well as in-person translation workshops and conferences, are offering three e-learning courses for translators working from French into Portuguese. The first is entitled “Notarial Practice”, the second “Civil Law: Obligations and Family”, and the third “Company and Business Law”.
The trainer is Dr. Francisco Telhado, qualified both in law and translation, who works with the Court of Justice of the European Union and has also been a freelance translator for many years from French to Portuguese in various fields, especially in law.
The brochures about the courses can be found here (Notarial Practice) as well as here (Civil Law: Obligations and Family) and here (Company and Business Law).
Regarding disclosure, I have no commercial relationship of any kind with the company Tradulínguas, and provide the above details purely for information purposes.
Now I know that some readers have reservations about Proz.com, but in the interests of the dissemination of information…
Proz.com is organizing a virtual event for lawyer-linguists entitled “A Meeting of Minds”.
A recent article in the magazine The Economist has highlighted a need for legal translators and linguists to work in ‘discovery’ (reviewing large quantities of documents and data to see which are relevant for a case). Indeed the article goes so far as to say at the end that some aspiring lawyers could do well to redirect their careers towards language-based positions.
Using some recent high-profile cases such as those involving the French couture houses Christian Louboutin and Yves Saint-Laurent, and Samsung v. Apple, the article points to a growing market for “cultural and linguistic experts”.
You can read the whole article here.
What do you think? Could this raise the profile of legal translation and linguistic/intercultural input?
You might also be interested in this guest post about translating during the document review process – When we are asked to translate useless materials…
In August this year, a US Judge, Steven D. Merryday at the District Court, Tampa Division, Florida, rejected submissions by lawyers that exceeded the page limit, and in his Order even gave them a lesson in editing – to avoid “redundancy, verbosity, and legalism”!
Many thanks to Mary Lynn for sending me this idea…
The UK’s most ancient laws are often a rich source of mirth – here is a short list, including a nod to the upcoming festive season. My absolute favorite, though, is the one about the taxman. 🙂 However many times I read it, it just goes round and round in my head!
You might also like this post about the simplification of the UK statute book.
A new language and linguistics magazine has just been launched that might interest you. The quarterly is called “Babel” and this is the editors’ description:
“Whilst Babel is written in English, it will address issues relating to many different human languages, including those under threat of disappearing as well as the world’s major languages. There will be regular features, such as biographies of influential thinkers on language (‘Lives in Language’) and explanations of technical terms (‘A Linguistic Lexicon’) and there will also be feature articles on topics of general interest as well as regular quizzes and competitions.”
There will be a talk on the IT tools used by European Commission translators at 14.30 on Wednesday 28 November at the EC Representation in the UK (Europe House, 32 Smith Square, London, SW1P 3 EU). Please find below more information on the presentation and details of how to register for the presentation.
A few weeks ago, I was invited by Jonathan Goldberg of the blog Le mot juste en anglais to review a paper, Les conceptions juridiques du harcèlement sexuel en France et aux USA – Avant et après l’affaire DSK¹, comparing the way in which the law sees sexual harassment in the United States and in France. I am thus in the slightly odd position of reviewing a paper originally written in English, but finalized in its French version, where my review itself is to be written in both English and French! Anyway, back to the point.
One of the opening statements in Abigail Saguy’s article is the affirmation that the Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) scandal could only have erupted in the USA². She then analyses the laws, legislative debate and case law over a period from the 1960s (in the US and rather later in France) to the present, in support of her argument that the scandal has also changed the “political and legal landscape” and “might influence the way in which France deals with sexual harassment cases in the future”.
I really liked this one – hope you do too!
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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