We have been providing you with translations of legal and financial texts for more than 20 years. And to mark our anniversary, we naturally asked ourselves whether the language of law has changed during this time. And of course there have been changes. The most important trend is the steady advance of Anglicisms into German legal terminology.
Trend 1: New legal concepts are increasingly being referred to using English words.
In German criminal law, the term stalking, which is strictly speaking an English word, has existed since 2007; then the English term phishing spread as fast as the related crimes did, and more recently the terms grooming and lovescamming have made their way into German legal language.
This seems to make life easy for us translators and interpreters – but you have to bear in mind that the English words used in Germany are not always used in the same way in English-speaking countries. Germans call their mobile phones “Handy”, and I doubt that many people who have no ties to German will understand that in English-speaking countries. And since Covid-19, working from home has been called “Home Office” in German. So, if a German person says “Ich bin im Home Office”, they are not in a political department, but are simply are working remotely! And when it comes to labour law, the English term for “bullying” is called “Mobbing” in German.