Thanks to the estimable Frédéric Houbert
@FHoubert, let me share with you a jewel from the French national library: “Discours sur les vices du langage judiciaire” by M. Berriat Saint-Prix, read on 24 August 1807 and published 1809, in which a law professor sets out central questions about plain language with elegance and clarity.
Author Archives: WordstoDeeds
Monday smile – Cheese coercion
Today’s Monday smile comes by courtesy of Kevin Underhill’s fantastic blog Lowering the Bar.
Kevin puts the case: “Two Florida plaintiffs have sued McDonald’s Corp. over its dastardly practice of—and you may wish to sit down before reading this—charging them full price for a Quarter Pounder with cheese although said Quarter Pounder had no cheese of any kind. Did this have anything to do with the fact that Plaintiffs asked for the cheese to be removed? Well, one could argue that it did. Because it did.”
Job opportunity – Translator/interpreter (DE/FR, DE/EN), Ministry of Justice & Consumer Protection, Germany
The German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (based in Berlin) is offering a permanent position for a translator/interpreter with German-French and German-English language combinations.
Seminar – Language and Translation at International Courts, Copenhagen, Denmark
On Thursday, 21 June 2018, from 1pm to 4.45 pm, the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen, Demark presents a public seminar entitled From ‘Texts in the Making’ to Authoritative Judgments. This is part of the iCourts initiative, the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts. Continue reading
Job opportunity – In-house translator (DE>EN)
Munich Re’s English Language Services team is expanding. They are looking for an experienced DE>EN translator – preferably with expertise in legal, financial or (re)insurance translation. Regulatory and financial reporting or corporate governance expertise would be a particular asset. To be based in Munich, Germany. Continue reading
Monday smile – Plus ça change…
Have a great week!
Back soon
This is just to let regular readers know that there will be no blog posts next week.
Back to normal from 11 June. 🙂
Language training handbooks for judicial cooperation
The European Judicial Training Network (EJTN) has produced, with the support of the European Union, a number of great handbooks on legal language, aimed at judicial cooperation across the Member States.
They are free to download, and contain introductions about vocabulary and syntax, summaries of points of law, and exercises for learners on each area, with a glossary and answer key.
I think they may be *very* useful for translators, lawyers working internationally, and many others, in addition to the judges for whom they were originally intended.
Guest post – The challenges and pitfalls of legal translation
For this guest post I am pleased to welcome John O’Shea, a highly experienced Greek-English legal translator with a background in law, for his insights into the challenges and pitfalls of legal translation. He also describes how he went into translation, his views on the best ways to specialize in this field, and the particularities of legal translation when a language of limited diffusion such as Greek is involved.
John is currently on the European Board of FIT (the International Federation of Translators), and also has been a university lecturer. Continue reading
Monday smile – Interpreting meeting-speak
Today’s smile is an extract from a book first published in 1933, entitled “England, their England“, by A. G. Macdonell. It is social satire, and takes the form of a travel memoir by a Scotsman whose father’s will has obliged him to live in England. There he is commissioned by a Welshman to write a book about the English from a foreigner’s point of view. 🙂
The extract below ends a description of the Assembly of the League of Nations at Geneva, involving an interpreter who would appear to be a proponent of plain language… 😉
