Mixed metaphors

Posted in Guest posts, Monday smiles by

Not strictly a guest post, but a delightful nugget found and sent in to me by Mary Lynn, a former Vice-Consul well versed in administrative burden, and reader of this blog. The trial order came to the attention of the press in August, so you may have seen it, but if you haven’t – enjoy!

A Kentucky judge, Martin Sheehan, received news of a settlement in a bitter legal malpractice suit he had been overseeing. Sheehan summed up his feelings about the development in an order cancelling the trial: Kissel v. Schwartz & Maines & Ruby Co., LPA, et al.

Credits: Reuters/Underhill.

Collaboration or exploitation?

Posted in Articles by

Something rather controversial for you today. The video presentation below discusses book digitization, use of crowd resources, and translation by non-professionals concurrently with language learning.

I think that the lawyers reading this will have plenty to say about various legal issues here, not to mention translators’ opinions.
Continue reading →

OECD glossaries

Posted in Books, Resources by

For international lawyers and translators alike, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes a number of comprehensive glossaries, some of which are bilingual or multilingual. I find the Corruption and Economics glossaries particularly useful. They are available as a print version, but can also be purchased in PDF format allowing them to be easily and quickly searched. Many can also be accessed through your browser.

Other subjects include, inter alia, fisheries, transport, insurance, environmental enforcement, statistics and compliance. Definitions are derived from international guidelines and standards.

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/glossaries

New access to supreme court rulings in French

Posted in News, Resources by

The Juricaf database has been freely accessible to the public since October this year, and includes almost 800,000 supreme court rulings from forty French-speaking countries, including OHADA countries as well as France, Switzerland, Canada and Belgium.

I love the clear and efficient interface too.
http://www.juricaf.org/

The project is a joint initiative of AHJUCAF, the Association of francophone supreme courts (50 members), and the Laboratoire Normologie Linguistique et Informatique du droit at the Sorbonne University in Paris. It is supported by the Organisation internationale de la francophonie and other organizations promoting the French language.

In the mid-term there is a plan to produce multilingual thesauri, in particular to assist legal professionals from common law jurisdictions, which sounds very interesting indeed.

My thanks go to Library Boy, an Ottawa law librarian’s blog, and the excellent Legal Informatics Blog for their posts on the Juricaf database. This post is by kind permission of AHJUCAF.

Play with words and do some good in the world

Posted in Resources by

“What if just knowing what a word meant could help feed hungry people around the world? Well, at FreeRice it does . . . the totals have grown exponentially.” (The Washington Post).

FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Programme.
FreeRice has two goals:
– Provide education to everyone for free.
– Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

English, German, Spanish, Italian and French are available, as well as some general knowledge subjects.

The site provides this great short video to introduce the site to new players: “Why is that important? Because the more people who play, the more rice we raise and the more people we can help. So far, we have raised enough to feed almost 5 million people.
The power of FreeRice lies in everyone doing our small part. So please share this video with friends and family, and let’s rice up against hunger!“

Legal history, fish, olive oil and a call for papers

Posted in Articles by

This post has a historical flavour, although it’s always surprising how much from the past is still relevant today…

Call for Papers: Roman Legal Tradition. The Editor and Board of Roman Legal Tradition welcome submissions for the forthcoming issue. Roman Legal Tradition is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the civilian tradition in ancient, medieval, and modern law. It is published by the Ames Foundation at the Harvard Law School and the University of Glasgow School of Law.

You may also enjoy this article in the latest issue: In Dubious Battle: An Economic Analysis of Emperor Hadrian’s Fish and Olive Oil Laws by Morris Silver. Plus ça change… (or should I say semper eadem…)

Update on N-grams

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For those who were interested in yesterday’s post, this dynamic presentation by two Harvard researchers offers a further insight into the subject (and a few smiles too): What we learned from 5 million books…

The video is part of the TED project, “a community welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world“. The website has a mine of interesting videos, and many have been subtitled as part of the Open Translation Project – a fascinating way to gain experience for new translators.

You may also be interested in the original post here.

Google N-grams, tracking word use

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This fascinating post by Dr Carol O’Sullivan at the University of Portsmouth may be of interest to translators and lawyers alike – sharing an interest in how words are used.
http://matsnews.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-n-grams-and-translation.html

It describes how collections of texts from 1500 to 2008, in several languages (Englishes, simplified Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish and Russian), can be used to examine synonyms, neologisms, and even to compare ‘competing words’.

I did a little test following Carol’s instructions, to compare “claimant” and “plaintiff”. Here are the results, for American English and for British English between 1800 and 2008. Note that the y-axis scales differ.

We can clearly see the jump in the use of “claimant” in the UK following the entering into force of the Civil Procedure Rules in April 1999. Continue reading →

Simply the best legal humor blog

Posted in Resources by

Lowering the Bar is an inspired fount of humour (or should I say humor). Whenever you’re feeling down and need to laugh out loud, I suggest taking a look at this wonderful blog. It is compiled by a San Francisco lawyer called Kevin Underhill. He is also a thoroughly good egg, who manages a pro bono program called Pets are Wonderful Support. (Mr Monti take note in Italy, please).
http://www.pawssf.org/

Here is just a taster. Go and explore – and do let me know your personal favorites!
http://kevinunderhill.typepad.com/lowering_the_bar/comical_case_names.html