Abstract

When translating court names, there are mainly two options: the replacement of the court name by a court name of the target language or a neutral translation as recommended by the German Federal Foreign Office. However, the main problem is, that every country has its very own court system and there are for example no District Courts in England and no Amtsgerichte in Switzerland. In dictionaries there are a lot of suggested translations, but you almost never get any further information with regard to which court name is suitable for which country. That's how the idea was born to get an overview of the court systems in some English and German speaking countries in order to find out how similar they really are and then to compare these results to the suggestions given in different dictionaries to find out, how useful these dictionary entries really are.