Monday smiles – Naming laws in Iceland

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Today I welcome a tongue-in-cheek guest post from Kevin Underhill, of the great legal humor blog Lowering the Bar that I posted about here. Over to you, Kevin!

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800px-GeysirEruptionNearThe Reykjavik District Court has ruled that a 15-year-old Icelandic girl can legally use the first name “Blaer,” reversing a contrary decision by government officials. Iceland has strict naming laws that require, among other things, that names fit standard grammar and pronunciation rules and be gender-appropriate. According to the report, the relevant committee refused to approve Blaer Bjarkardottir’s first name because she is a girl and the panel viewed the name as “too masculine.”

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Guest post – Reporting from the Justice Interpreting seminar

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guest bookToday Marta Stelmaszak is reporting from the seminar “Justice Interpreting: the Need for Quality Standards” held in London on 23 February last (see here). Marta is a Polish translator and interpreter from the UK and is “devoted to constant development”, including through her involvement on the Management Committee of the Chartered Institute of Linguists and her great blog. Over to you, Marta!

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Guest post – Differences between English and US law: choose your words carefully

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guest bookToday’s guest post is by Scott J. Arrington, a partner in the law firm McDermott Will & Emery in the United States. He represents clients in connection with infrastructure development, acquisitions, dispositions and financings, with a focus on international projects in the oil and gas, petrochemical, power and mining industries.

Scott has a particuarly linguistic bent, since he speaks Mandarin Chinese and Spanish as well as English.

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Conference – Language issues in EU law, Opatija, Croatia

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800px-Opatija_HafenA multidisciplinary international conference is to be held in Opatija, Croatia from 19-20 April 2013, entitled Language Issues in EU Law in the light of Croatian Accession, at Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence.

A wide range of topics will be covered: EU multilingual lawmaking, theoretical approach to legal translation in the EU, legal translation and comparative law, the impact of English on the translation of EU legislation, interpretation of multilingual legislation at the CJEU, multilingualism as an obstacle to harmonization, the call for a new legal culture, the fiction of autonomous EU legal concepts, creating Croatian terms for EU legal concepts, role of the Croatian language in the EU, new challenges to Croatian judges, implementation of Directive 2010/64/EU regarding the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings, and others.

Target audience: lawyers and linguists from academia, translators, court interpreters, judges.

For more information see the conference website.