Legalese: A mayor abundamiento

Today, I'm going to tell you all about a mayor abundamiento. Furthermore, I am going to tell you how I came across it. A mayor abundamiento, les voy a dar una definición de esta frase. As you may already know or have guessed from my bilingual antics, it's just a fancy way of saying furthermore. It seems trivial to me now, but when I first came across it in a document for the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, France, many years ago, I had no idea what to make of it. Usually I can deduce something from a term or phrase's context or etymology. Most terms are related to something. But this one stumped me for several hours until I took the trouble of looking it up in the right source.

According to Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, abundamiento means: abundancia followed by "desuso". So a literal translation might be Toward/for greater abundance.That sounds delightfully pompous!

I sometimes feel like using these pharses in everyday speech like Don Quijote using archaic, chivalrous Spanish with the girls he came across in the inn. That reminds me of what some people say in Chile, completely from a different register, for comic effect: Me es inverosímil! A mayor abundamiento...

La notario

Any language you speak, read, write, translate from or into is at a crossroads. There is always the old way (be it spelling or pronunciation) and the new way. Even during the time that I have been speaking Spanish, the letter ch was eliminated. Now words beginning with ch are alphabetized under the letter c. Unlike English, these rules are governed by the Real Academia de la Lengua Española.

What do you think about names of professions and positions ending with an o even though the person in question is a woman? I came across "la notario" on a Mexican legal document. Although it is gramatically correct, and sounds "official", I can't help thinking it should be "la notaria". However, I believe you can rightfully say la abogada but not la jueza, although I hear it often in spoken Spanish.

My role here is not to be the definitive authority on the topic or provide you with an exhaustive list of examples. Rather I wanted to bring this phenomenon to your attention and ask you how you deal with it. If you write your translation according to the official rules, you are being correct on one level and making a statement on another. If you write your translation the way people usually say these words, you are being officially incorrect, and you will also be making a statement. Who is to say that legal documents won't say "la notaria" twenty or thirty years hence?

On a different note, I was in Viña del Mar over the long (Navy Day) weekend. I saw an ex-president, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle walking past me near the casino plaza. It is amazing to see famous people in person. Frei was a lawmaker when he was president some years ago. Now he is running for president again.

Legal separation: one step toward divorce

I learned about this term in an online legal terminology class I am taking (the jury is still out on the course, so I will let you know how I liked it once I've completed it). It doesn't mean that the spouses are divorced, and it doesn't mean that the spouses are entirely married. Why on earth would anyone seek that status?

Well, as it turns out, there are a few good reasons:

* It is a step toward divorce, so when the parties finally wish to divorce, certain agreements are already in place.

* There are certain benefits like military benefits and healthcare benefits that one spouse would lose if divorced but would not if legally separated. See Sick Around America and you will see what I mean.

* Religions where divorce is not accepted and spouses prefer to stay married albeit on paper.

I have only come across legal separation on Peruvian divorce papers. Up until recently, Chile had no divorce law, but rather a loophole where if one of the parties declared that his or her address was not the correct one when the marriage took place, then that marriage was void. Today, Chileans get divorced the regular way just like people do in most countries.

¿Y cuánto te vas a demorar?

¿Cuántas veces hemos escuchado esta pregunta ya sea de nuestros seres queridos o de los mismos clientes? Hasta nosotros, los traductores queremos saber cuánto tiempo nos vamos a demorar en terminar una traducción. ¿No sería maravilloso poder decir "Yo me demoro una hora en traducir 500 palabras, sea cual sea el tema, dificultad, formato, hora del día, estado de ánimo...".

Lamentablemente, esto no va a ser posible hasta que no nos convertamos en robots o los textos que traducimos sean completamente predecibles. Sin embargo, opino que es sumamente legítimo el deseo de medir el tiempo que nos demoramos en traducir cierto tipo de textos bajo condiciones normales ya que el tiempo es dinero y es bueno y a veces necesario saber cuánto vamos a ganar durante un período dado.

Por ello, recomiendo un cronómetro en línea que, además de ser gratis, no le quita memoria RAM al PC. sites. Se llama Online Stopwatch. Yo lo utilizo para dos propósitos: cuando estoy realizando una revisión por la cual cobro por hora y cuando quiero saber cuánto me voy a demorar en traducir un texto. Me gusta su sencillo diseño tipo "equipo de música" con un botón para pausar el cronómetro si por algún motivo queremos interrumpir nuestra tarea para hacer otra cosa.

COCA: an addictive corpus without the negative effects

One of my favorite components of translating are corpora and sifting through thousands of words. It is a kind of linguistic voyeurism. I get to see how things were written or said by countless people in myriad settings. In one of my Delicious forays, I chanced upon COCA, short for Corpus of Contemporary American English. No, it has nothing to do with coca leaves or Coca Cola, though I am addicted to it, I confess. Is there perchance a concordance 12 step program out there?

It is a huge body of texts with over 385 million words. The sources are varied: the spoken word, magazines, newspapers and academic texts. Look up almost any legal term, and you will get a very long list of phrases where that word appears. Sometimes it is fun just to browse and see what pops up. Other times, you may like to know what the most common collocates are for a word. Take the word custody. I looked it up in COCA, to see what verbs precede it. Here is a sample of the results:

... attempts to resolve custody
Dotson was taken into custody
We share custody
... by those who are held in custody
... their efforts to get custody

Do any of you readers out there use corpora? If so, how?

Online translation memory

I have read in several forum posts on translator sites that translators generally do not like using translation memories given to them by the client. They say, and I tend to agree with them, that the quality of the translations is not very good. However, assuming that this is true, there is a lot to learn from a bad translation. It confirms that what you know is "right" or perhaps "righter".

Nevertheless, I have picked up some translations and ways of handling the source test from translation memories that I would not have thought of on my own. So I welcome translation memories from clients. I use what I like and discard what I do not.

I recently found an online translation memory, Linear B, that I rather enjoy. I consult it to get a second opinion and sometimes come across pleasant surprises.

Here are two results for the Spanish term anexo:

"... la forma y el lugar del signo distintivo de matriculación se especifican en el anexo, aunque esta disposición figura ahora en la segunda parte de la enmienda nº ...
... size , shape and location of the distinguishing registration sign are specified in the annex, although that provision is now also covered by the second part of amendment ..."

"el anexo, en virtud del cual los donantes pueden recibir una compensación que se limita ...
the addendum , whereby donors may receive compensation which is severely restricted to compensating the expenses ..."

Easements

I was reminded by this term when translating a technical document. In fact, it was about setting up solar farms in Italy. Nevertheless, the law came into play when discussing easements or servidumbres in Spanish. I find the term in both languages to be quite odd.

The Duhaime online law dictionary gives the following definition:

"... a right which one landowner has with respect to the lands of another - either the right to do something on the other's land, or the right to prevent the other owner from using their land in a particular way."

In this particular document, the easement had to do with laying cable across property that did not belong to the solar farm.