What it is
A name written in one community carries marks above or below some of its letters. It is then entered in a document produced by another community whose alphabet is the same but whose inventory of marks is not. The question is whether the marks survive.
Three answers are in circulation. The marks are reproduced; they are dropped and the bare letter stands; or they are resolved into a digraph the receiving language does have, so that the letter o with diaeresis becomes oe. The difference is between a document that identifies a person and one that identifies a slightly different person.
The boundary against transliteration is drawn by the source rather than invented here. Where the two records use the same characters the name is reproduced; where the characters differ it is transliterated. Those are consecutive articles of one convention, and the second is the subject transliteration-and-romanization would own if it were written.
Where the expectation comes from
The authority is a ratified treaty, and it is contradicted by a national code.
- The Convention (No. 14) on the recording of surnames and forenames in civil status registers, signed at Berne on 13 September 1973, provides at Article 2 that where the characters are the same the surnames and forenames "shall be reproduced literally without alteration or translation", and that the diacritic marks forming part of them "shall also be reproduced, even if such marks do not exist in the language in which the record is to be made." Article 3 sends the different-script case to transliteration and to the ISO standards, and Article 11 keeps the Convention in force indefinitely subject to denunciation. Only the French original is authentic.
- Seven states have ratified. Türkiye deposited on 9 February 1976 and the Netherlands on 1 July 1977, so both states of this workspace's daily pair are bound, alongside Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy and Luxembourg. The later Convention (No. 34) replaces the Vienna convention of 1976, not this one.
- The explanatory report adopted at Interlaken on 14 September 1973 settles its strength in one clause: "If the record is typewritten, the diacritic marks are to be added by hand if necessary."
- Against that stands Article 3.282 of the Lithuanian Civil Code, which the Court of Justice describes as requiring that forenames, surnames and place names follow the rules of the Lithuanian language.
Codified is confirmed, on a different warrant from the rest of this category. Every other Codified candidate here rests on an orthography authority's rules; this one rests on an instrument of international law. The record therefore shows what the tier does not mean: Codified says a norm text of general application would have to change, not that the expectation is uncontested. A House rule points the same way from below, the Baden-Württemberg guidelines directing that personal names keep their diacritical marks.
Consequences for translation
The expectation fully determines the target form, and the form it determines is the source form.
- The right output is to leave the name alone. This is the section's clearest case of a determinate conversion whose correct result is identity, easy to check and easy to breach through a pipeline rather than through a decision.
- Technical incapacity is not a defence. The instrument contemplated a typewriter and answered that the marks go on by hand. What a translator owes when the target system truly cannot produce the character is settled by nothing opened here, and a fallback invented for the occasion belongs with the client.
- The digraph is the trap, not the bare letter. Dropping a mark leaves a name visibly incomplete; resolving the letter o with diaeresis into oe leaves one that looks correct and is a different string.
- Two codified rules can meet over one document, and the conflict is then a legal question rather than a linguistic one.
Examples
LT>FR
- Source: Malgožata Runevič-Vardyn
- Target: Malgožata Runevič-Vardyn
- Comment: The applicant in Case C-391/09 as both versions of the judgment print her name, the letters z and c carrying the caron. The Court's own text does in passing what the case is about.
TR>NL
- Source: a surname containing the letter s with cedilla
- Target: the same surname, the letter s with cedilla retained
- Comment: Dutch has no letter s with cedilla, which is the case Article 2 addresses by requiring reproduction even where the mark does not exist in the language of the record. Both states have ratified, so over a Dutch civil status record this is a treaty obligation and not a preference.
DE>NL
- Source: the letter o with diaeresis, in a surname
- Target: the letter o with diaeresis, not the digraph oe
- Comment: The explanatory report's own illustration, and the substitution a German-speaking source most invites. Germany and the Netherlands are both bound.
References
- Convention (No. 14) on the recording of surnames and forenames in civil status registers, signed at Berne on 13 September 1973. Articles 2, 3 and 11, read in the French original and in the English version published by the International Commission on Civil Status on its own site, both carrying the statement that only the French original is authentic. The status chart on the same site gives the signatures, the ratifications and the dates of entry into force.
- Explanatory report to that Convention, adopted by the General Assembly at Interlaken on 14 September 1973, commentary on Article 2, read as the English PDF on the same site. That document states neither that it is a translation nor that a French original governs it.
- Convention (No. 34) on the issue of multilingual and coded extracts from civil status records and multilingual and coded civil status certificates, signed at Strasbourg on 14 March 2014, Article 17.
- Judgment of 12 May 2011 in Case C-391/09, Runevič-Vardyn and Wardyn, ECLI:EU:C:2011:291, English and French language versions, for the party names and for the Lithuanian provisions as the Court states them.
- Richtlinien und Hinweise für die Anfertigung von Urkundenübersetzungen, Stand Juli 2004, VVU and BDÜ, recommended by the Justizministerium and the Kultusministerium of Baden-Württemberg, section 18.1.