Strauss-Khan's accuser was misquoted, Lawyer says

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Nafissatou Diallo after a meeting Wednesday in Manhattan.

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By JIM DWYER, JOHN ELIGON and ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Published: July 28, 2011

A lawyer for the hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her in May said Wednesday that taped conversations, two of them made a day after the encounter, prove that his client had no intention of exploiting the charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn to make money.

The lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, and the housekeeper, Nafissatou Diallo, spent much of the day at the district attorney's office in Manhattan, where they listened to a recording of conversations Ms. Diallo had with a fellow African immigrant in an Arizona jail after she said she was attacked. Law enforcement officials told Mr. Thompson and The New York Times last month that Ms. Diallo could be heard saying on the tape "words to the effect of: 'Don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I'm doing.' "

But after listening to the recording on Wednesday, Mr. Thompson told reporters at a news conference that Ms. Diallo's statements had been mischaracterized. He said that at no point did she raise the issue of Mr. Strauss-Kahn's wealth or status in the way that prosecutors had described it. Rather, he said, the man she was speaking with, who initiated the calls to Ms. Diallo, remarked during one conversation that Ms. Diallo could stand to gain money from the case, but she quickly dismissed the idea and said it was a matter for her lawyer.

Of even greater importance, Mr. Thompson said, during the first of the calls, her description of the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn was consistent with what she told investigators a day earlier. In sexual-assault cases, people who hear an early account of an attack are called "outcry witnesses," and are often used to buttress the credibility of a person making an accusation.

"She told the guy that someone tried to rape her at her job," Mr. Thompson said in an interview after his news conference. "She said: 'I didn't know who he was. We fought each other. Because he wasn't able to take off my clothes, he put his penis in my mouth. He touched me. They took me to the hospital, and they arrested him.' "

In a statement Wednesday, Erin M. Duggan, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said: "This is a pending criminal case. We will have no comment on evidence, or on any meetings between prosecutors and witnesses, civil attorneys or defense counsel."

According to Mr. Thompson, Ms. Diallo said during her first conversation with the man in jail that her attacker was a powerful person, but that she was now with the government, presumably a reference to protection provided by investigators.

"The first call that the guy in prison made to Nafi Diallo corroborates that Dominique Strauss-Kahn violently attacked her and tried to rape her," Mr. Thompson said.

It was during the second call that the subject of money came up, the lawyer said.

"The guy in jail called back several hours later, expressing concern, 'Are you O.K.,' and she says she is," Mr. Thompson said. "During the second conversation, she said, 'People from France keep calling me and saying he's rich and powerful.' "

The man then expressed concern about her, the lawyer said, asking whether she was safe.

"She told him she was in Manhattan, that a lawyer was coming to see her - it was not me," Mr. Thompson said. "She said, 'Don't worry, I know what I'm doing.' "

At some point, the man told Ms. Diallo that by moving forward with the case, "you'll get a lot of money," Mr. Thompson said. But he insisted that Ms. Diallo made it clear that was not her intention.

"She said, 'Stop, stop.' He's going on and on on the phone about it, she didn't want to deal with that. She said, 'Please stop. Wait, wait. The lawyer will get it.' Meaning, the lawyer would deal with it."

But prosecutors did not see it that way. Mr. Thompson said that in a phone conversation late on the afternoon of June 30, he was told by a senior prosecutor that the conversations created "big problems" for the case, and that the prosecutor mischaracterized Ms. Diallo's statements as implying that she intended to exploit the charges for money.

"It is a fact that what they told me and what they told you was not accurate," Mr. Thompson said. "Ms. Diallo never said, 'I am going to get this guy's money' or anything about scheming to get his money."

Mr. Thompson was not given copies of the recordings, and described them based on notes he took during an extended meeting with prosecutors, in which he listened to the recordings with a Fulani interpreter hired by the district attorney's office. The calls were recorded at an immigration detention center where the man was incarcerated.

The meeting with Mr. Thompson came just days after Ms. Diallo broke her silence and granted interviews to Newsweek and ABC News. In the interviews, she disputed the account in The Times of what she said to the man in the Arizona jail, saying, as Mr. Thompson argued on Wednesday, that it was in relation to getting a lawyer.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn resigned as managing director of the International Monetary Fund after his arrest.

Prosecutors are still deciding whether to proceed with the case.

Lawyers for Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Ms. Diallo had discussions in mid-June regarding sharing facts about the case and exploring a potential resolution.

The discussions did not include substantive talk about the case and ended without any agreement, according to a lawyer briefed on the discussions who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were private.

But a different person briefed on the matter said that Mr. Thompson had sought a monetary settlement.

Mr. Thompson plainly denied that assertion. "At no point in time did I ever convey a monetary settlement demand to Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lawyers," he said later.

One of Mr. Strauss-Kahn's lawyers, William W. Taylor III, called Mr. Thompson's statement "extraordinarily misleading." But Mr. Taylor declined to elaborate.

The talks apparently broke down because the parties could not agree on whether to use mediation, the lawyer briefed on the discussions said.

Mr. Thompson has said that Ms. Diallo intends to file a lawsuit against Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

Professor Peter Newmark passed away.

Professor Peter Newmark

1916-2011
A personal memory

Known worldwide as an early pioneer of the nascent discipline of Translation Studies, our friend and colleague, Professor Newmark, has died aged 95 in his home town of Guildford. ‘Passions’ and ‘commitments’ are a common and often weakened currency in the language of the 21st century. Not so for Peter. He was truly passionate about and committed to the learning and teaching of modern languages, was vehemently opposed to restrictive changes in government policy, and dedicated his time, expertise and energies to his beloved Institute of Linguists.

For Peter, life was a matter of absolutes: truth, family, friendship, literature, music, Palestine, ethics, good translation and bad translation. In a valueless (as Peter saw it) post-modernist world, this got him into trouble in many ways and on many occasions, but it also won him friends and admirers.

In the early 1980s, Peter was a true friend to the newly born Centre for Translation Studies at Surrey, founded in the aftermath of the Thatcher government’s university cuts by Nigel Reeves and our friend and colleague Gunilla Anderman, whose own death in 2007 greatly affected Peter until the end.

Peter continued to teach and lecture in the Centre during the following decades. His final lecture at Surrey was given only two years ago to a packed room, full of students eager to see and hear the man whose books and publications they had read and learnt from.

I shared many jokes with Peter about social class, disagreed with him about corpus linguistics and lexicography, and indulged in many a welcome glass of wine. Peter’s roots were firmly planted in a close family life. Our thoughts are with Pauline, Liz and Matt.

I will miss Peter, as will not only my colleagues but also our future generations of students, whom he would have loved to go on teaching.

The funeral is for close family only. A memorial will be held for Peter on 17th October in the Guildford Guildhall. No more details at present.

Margaret Rogers
12th July 2011

Centre for Translation Studies
University of Surrey
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/translation/
Tel.: + 44 (0)1483 682832
Fax.: +44 (0) 1483 689505

Matar o morir....

No es lo mismo matar que morir y este caso suele ser ejemplo de la diferencia que establecen los verbos transitivos (donde el significado del verbo pasa a un argumento que llamamos objeto directo o complemento directo) y los verbos intransitivos en los que no se da esta traslación semántica formalizada en la distinta construcción sintáctica.
El periodista debió decir: "hasta matar a su esposa" pero se confunde tal vez por que la nominalización del verbo anula la diferencia gramatical ("hasta la muerte de su esposa"). También sirve como frase hiperbólica para exagerar un esfuerzo extremo: "trabajamos hasta morir", "caminamos hasta morir", y se aplica a la expresión amorosa, como en la letra de la canción de "Nietos del Futuro":

Porque te quiero te quiero así
te quiero hasta morir
lucharé por tu amor
no voy a dejarte ir.

Te invitamos a compartir sobre el ejercicio profesional de la traducción en Guatemala, no dudes en contribuir ya que tu opinión puede incidir en los que deseamos mejorar nuestra calidad profesional.

Cultismos

Un cultismo es un préstamo de una lengua clásica (por lo general, el latín; aunque también puede ser el griego). La mayor parte de las palabras de origen latino que tenemos en español tienen una tradición ininterrumpida de uso desde la Antigüedad hasta nuestros días. Pero cuidado, porque cuando hablamos aquí de latín, no hemos de pensar en los discursos de Cicerón ni en la poesía de Ovidio, sino en lo que hablaban los soldados o los mercaderes que vinieron a esta península nuestra. El léxico vulgar, que a menudo se apartaba en muchos aspectos de las formas clásicas, se fue alterando además conforme el castellano se iba alejando del latín. Así es como se forman palabras como viña, reja o llamar, que en latín clásico fueron, respectivamente, vinea, regula y clamare. Esto es lo que se denomina léxico patrimonial.

Estos vocablos patrimoniales cuentan con parientes más distinguidos, que son los que se codeaban con obispos, notarios, poetas y eruditos. Su transmisión no fue de boca a oreja, con el margen que esto deja para las variaciones y alteraciones, sino que tuvo lugar preferentemente por vía escrita. Cuando se presentaban en forma oral solía ser en contextos institucionales que los rodeaban de una cierta gravedad, como el culto religioso o la lectura en voz alta de escrituras de propiedad y fórmulas legales. La forma de estas palabras se mantuvo más próxima a la de sus originales latinos. Tan solo sufrieron las mínimas adaptaciones para que resultaran pronunciables por labios que ya no tenían los hábitos del latín sino los del romance. Es lo que ocurrió con palabras como voluntad, del latín voluntatem, evangelio, que procede del griego euangelios por mediación del latín evangelium o cátedra, otro helenismo mediado por el latín. Estos parientes de posibles son, evidentemente, los cultismos.

A menudo nos encontramos en el vocabulario de nuestra lengua con dobletes populares y cultos que comparten un mismo étimo latino y que se han especializado para significados diferentes. Así, frente a reja tenemos regla; junto a llamar, clamar; y resulta que palabras en apariencia tan alejadas como cátedra ycadera son hermanas que tomaron caminos muy diferentes.

La sustitución del latín por el castellano fue más compleja de lo que normalmente nos imaginamos. No hay, ni mucho menos, un día y una hora concretos en que muere una lengua y nace la otra. La transición es gradual y cualquier límite que se quiera fijar no pasará de ser convencional. Es más, para complicar todavía un poco las cosas, siglos después de la desaparición del imperio romano, el latín y el castellano coexistían, solo que en contextos diferentes y con funciones también diferenciadas. El gramático que explicaba las partes de la oración en latín después le pedía al zapatero que le remendara las botas en romance.

Progresivamente, el castellano va ocupando el espacio que le estaba reservado al latín y en este proceso tiene un papel destacado la apropiación del vocabulario latino. Efectivamente, si empezamos a utilizar una lengua para hablar de lo que antes le correspondía a la otra, nos vamos a encontrar con que las necesidades de vocabulario aumentan. No es lo mismo hablar del tiempo y de las cosechas que escribir la historia de un reino o compilar un tratado de astronomía. Una cosa es cantar una canción de siega y otra muy diferente componer un soneto. Ante esta necesidad de ampliar los límites de lo que se podía decir con comodidad en castellano, se podía inventar nuevas palabras o echar mano de las que ya ofrecía el latín. Por eso el reinado de Alfonso X es un periodo de incorporación acelerada de cultismos como dureza o húmedo y por eso mismo Juan de Mena en el siglo XV, Garcilaso en el XVI o Góngora en el XVII nos inundarán de latinismos comoterso, atónito o fatigar. Esto les valió la censura de los puristas, que ya por aquel entonces actuaban como celosos guardianes de las esencias del idioma.

Y el desarrollo científico desde el siglo XVII hasta nuestros días no se puede concebir sin la incorporación de un sinnúmero de neologismos tomados directamente de las lenguas clásicas, como óptica, o construidos sobre raíces grecolatinas, comoelectricidad, fotometría o televisión. Aunque aquí ya todo se complica un poco porque el español no beberá directamente de las fuentes clásicas, sino que recogerá este vocabulario de otras lenguas de cultura como el francés y el inglés.

Lo anterior no pasa de ser un repaso forzosamente somero. Si quieres profundizar en el tema, puedes descargarte un estudio de José Luis Herrero sobre los Cultismos renacentistas donde encontrarás explicaciones más detalladas.

[Blog de Lengua Española de Alberto Bustos, Cultismos]

Air Canada fined $12,000 for not speaking French to passenger.

By Andrew Moran for Digital Journal


Friday, July 15, 2011.
Ottawa - A federal court in Ottawa ruled that Air Canada must apologize to two Ottawa passengers and pay $12,000 after failing to provide the couple services in French. The judge ruled that the airline failed to follow the Official Languages Act.
During two Air Canada flights between Ottawa and the United States in the spring of 2009, Michael Thibodeau and his wife, Lynda, were refused service in French about eight times, including when the federal government employee asked for a 7-Up but was given a Sprite instead.
Following this incident, the couple launched a lawsuit with the federal court because of the language laws in Canada. A federal institution must offer their services in both English and French as part of the Official Languages Act.
On Wednesday, a Federal Court judge in Ottawa sided with the couple and ruled that Air Canada must remunerate the couple $12,000 and offer an apology, according to CTV News. The judge also ordered the airline to implement a system where it follows possible violations of its language duties – the former Crown Corporation retained its language obligations when it was privatized.
“The applicants’ language rights are clearly very important to them and the violation of their rights caused them a moral prejudice, pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of their vacation,” Justice Marie-Josee Bedard ruled. “It is also my opinion that awarding damages in this case will serve the purpose of emphasizing the importance of the rights at issue and will have a deterrent effect.”
Thibodeau defended his rights following the ruling and said that all he sought was his entitlement to be served in French.
“If I take a flight and I’m not served in the language of my choice, and I don’t do anything about it, then my right is basically dead,” said Thibodeau, reports the Globe and Mail. “I was not asking for anything other than what I was already entitled to. I have a right to be served in French.”
The couple was originally suing for $25,000 each and $500,000 in punitive damages, but the judge said that although the problem is systemic, they are trying to meet its language obligations and were not nefarious.
Thibodeau said he was disappointed with the amount, but is happy that the court recognized that “our rights were violated on several occasions.”
An Air Canada spokesperson refused to comment on the court’s decision.
This isn’t the first time that Thibodeau has taken legal action against Air Canada over its language services. In 2000, he launched a lawsuit after a flight attendant did not serve him in French during a flight between Ottawa and Montreal, reports the Ottawa Citizen.
He was then honoured by the French-language rights group, Imperatif Francais.

International Federation of Translators launched a new website.

Colleagues:

FIT -- Fédératíon Intérnatíonal des Traducteurs / International Federation of Translators - has a new website at http://fit-ift.org/.

Etimologìa de "canìcula"

Cuando llega el verano y el mercurio amenaza con reventar los termómetros, se empieza a hablar de la canícula. Hoy este sustantivo se ha convertido en sinónimo de ‘periodo de calor intenso’; pero etimológicamente tuvo un significado más preciso. Canícula es un diminutivo de can. Se trata, en realidad, de una formación latina a partir de canis, y si tuviéramos que traducirlo saldría algo así como ‘la perrita’.

La vinculación entre tan simpático animal y los calores que nos toca sufrir todos los años es astronómica. La perrita de marras es Sirio, la estrella más brillante de la constelación del Can Mayor. Antiguamente, la época más calurosa del año coincidía con los días en que Sirio salía y se ponía al mismo tiempo que el sol. Este periodo iba del 22 de julio al 23 de agosto. Pero los milenios no pasan en balde y la perrita Sirio va retrasando cada vez más sus paseos celestes. Hoy tiene al sol esperándola hasta septiembre (aunque en esto me remito al mejor criterio de los astrónomos, que uno bastante tiene con ser lingüista).

Desde un punto de vista etimológico, este uso de canícula donde realmente tiene sentido es en el hemisferio norte, puesto que la configuración del cielo nocturno en el sur es completamente diferente. Por eso siento curiosidad por saber si también se habla de la canícula en los países del hemisferio austral. Si algún lector de esas tierras me lo pudiera aclarar, se lo agradecería.

Tomado del [Blog de Lengua Española de Alberto Bustos, Etimología de 'canícula']