This electronic dictionary of law in English could be useful to both non-native lawyers and translators. Don’t be fooled by the clear and simply written definitions – it contains plenty to content even those with a high level of English – as an example have a look at the screenshot below showing collocating words and phrases for “proximate cause” in context.
Yearly Archives: 2012
Stop press – EU translation memories updated *again*!
Following my post in April, I would like to let you know that the translation memories made available by the Directorate-General for Translation at the European Commission Joint Research Centre have been updated for the second time this year.
In the April 2012 release, documents up to 2010 were included. Now, 2011 data has been added – a further 6 million translation units. Somewhat confusingly, the new update is called “DGT-TM-2012” even though the data is from 2011.
New features of DGT-TM-2012 are:
- Small amounts of Irish data are now included for the first time;
- Significantly more data for the Bulgarian, Maltese and Romanian languages;
- Mostly about 285K new translation units per language.
The translation memories are parallel texts of the entire body of European legislation, comprising all the treaties, regulations and directives adopted by the European Union (EU), in 23 languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, German, Greek, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish.
You can download them from this page. Scroll down to “DGT-TM-release 2012” for the 2011 data. Information on how to produce bilingual extractions appears on the same page.
Monday smiles – Jail bird
To start the week off… this cartoon from Mark Anderson’s website Andertoons.
Guest post – Reporting from Montreal
It is my great pleasure to introduce a guest report on the Sixth Summer Institute of Jurilinguistics held at the end of August, written by Jean Leclercq, co-author of the erudite and multifaceted blog Le mot juste en anglais.
Leclercq trained both in literature and the law, and worked as a translator, from English and Spanish to French, at the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva for 26 years. Retirement hasn’t stopped him translating, often on a voluntary basis, and keeping extremely active through various linguistic and online activities amongst others. A vous Jean !
Multilingual glossary on secure documents
If you work with official and/or secure documents or with descriptions of how those documents are produced, you might be interested in this glossary published by the Council of the European Union (Consilium).
Stop press – Official forum to collect evidence on UK court interpreting scandal
The ongoing scandal in the UK relating to the outsourcing of court interpreting services to Applied Language Solutions/Capita (see this post) reached the Parliamentary select committee last week, which can watched online at: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=11582
The Justice Committee has launched a call for evidence as an online forum (kudos for being so up-to-date!) but it will close in two days, on 2 November 2012.
Monday smiles – British Judge rules that iPad is cool
First of all, apologies to those of you who have already heard about this – I only just found out, thanks to Daily Tech. Now you may know that I’m an iPad fan (see this post about useful apps), so I just had to blog about this development in the battle over patents between Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics.
Corporate finance glossary
I recently came across a very comprehensive glossary on treasury, risk and corporate finance, published on the Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT) website. ACT is based in the City of London, and is a professional body defining standards, promoting best practice, and supporting continuing professional development.
The glossary in monolingual (English only), but covers a wide range of terms, and is well cross-referenced. You can find it here: http://www.treasurers.org/glossary
If you work in the financial field, you might also be interested in this post about a forthcoming workshop in London, and this post about credit default swaps.
Clear video guide to the US legislative process
As a change from all the election fever going on at the moment, I thought you might enjoy this simple video presentation of the legislative process that has recently been placed online by the US Congress.
http://beta.congress.gov/legislative-process/
There are also eight short podcasts about related points, and transcripts are provided for both video and audio clips.
Monterey offers 5-day course in court interpreting (2013)
The well-known Monterey Institute of International Studies is offering a 5-day course, details of which can be found below. I’m sure that many of you will have heard of the eminent Holly Mikkelson. Monterey also runs translation courses regularly. My only regret for those of us outside the US is that they don’t run more courses that can be attended online.
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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