Articles on the laws and politics of Austria are full of irritating mistranslations of Austrian legal terms of art. It's obvious that much of the material was written by Austrians with a somewhat limited grasp of legal English. They had to come up with translations for names of institutions, job titles of office holders, and section headings in statutes. They were unfamiliar with the conventions already established by professional translators and the academic community. They cheerfully invented their own. Often badly.
One particularly obnoxious error is obsessively rendering Bundes- as federal with no regard for context or connotation. In the English-language literature, Austria does not have a "federal" constitutional court, for the simple reason that it does not have any state constitutional courts, or any other state courts for that matter. Austria also does not have a "federal" police, "federal" penitentiaries, a "federal" army, or a "federal" ministry of justice. There are no ministries below the national level and nobody writing in English goes out of their way to pretend there are. Calling it the "federal" ministry of justice isn't just redundant; it's actively misleading, which is probably a large part of the reason nobody actually calls it that.
Books edit
Usage statistics from Google Ngram Viewer:
Ministries in general:
- "Austrian Minister of X" is vastly more common than "Austria Federal Minister of X" [1]
- Same if you say "Ministry" instead of "Minister" [2]
- We can't test "Minister/Ministry of X of Austria" vs. "Federal Ministry/Minister of X of Austria" because Google will only let you use five words max.
- Replacing "of" with "for" gets zero results so let's stick with "of" from here on out.
Ministry of Justice:
- Lots of results for "Austrian Minister of Justice", literally nothing for "Austrian Federal Minister of Justice" [3]
- Same for "Ministry" [4]
Ministry of Transport:
- Lots of results for "Austrian Ministry of Transport", essentially nothing for "Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport" [5]
- No hits for "Minister" either way [6] − well, it's a semi-apolitical infrastructure department that doesn't do anything flashy and that consequently doesn't get talked about all that much.
Scholarly papers edit
Google Scholar contains too much crap and full text search on Sci-Hub is broken again, so let's just use JSTOR. Most JSTOR hits are from legitimate, peer-reviewed academic journals and were written (or translated) by people actually fluent in English.
Ministries in general:
- "Ministry" gets 691 hits, "Federal Ministry" only gets 173. [7][8]
- With "Minister", it's 402 to 11. [9][10]
Ministry of Justice:
Ministry of Transport:
Specific influential authors edit
Books and papers are not all created equal of course; some are more popular and more widely quoted than others. Search result counts, in other words, can be misleading. Let's look at what the leading Austrian and international experts are doing in the most influential relevant books, just in case.
Manfred Stelzer, The Constitution of the Republic of Austria
- Austrian
- Full Professor at the Department of Constitutional Law, University of Vienna
- Sometimes uses "federal minister" but says "minister" about twice as often − specifically, uses "minister", "federal minister", and "cabinet minister" interchangeably and with approximately equal frequency
- Always uses "ministry", never "federal ministry"
Kurt Heller, Outline of Austrian Constitutional Law
- Austrian
- Biglaw business lawyer, lecturer at the University of Linz, Justice on the Constitutional Court
- Mostly uses "federal minister", only rarely just says "minister"
- Always uses "ministry", never "federal ministry"
Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy
- Dutch
- Highly influential political scientist and federalism expert; Patterns of Democracy is very widely read
- Always uses "minister", never "federal minister"
- Same for "ministry"
Jan Erk, Explaining Federalism: State, Society, and Congruence
- Dutch
- Influential federalism expert and highly distinguished academic; has held positions at universities in some five or six different countries and presumably knows how actual specialists actually talk about these things
- Always uses "minister", never "federal minister" in the context of Austria, but does the opposite when talking about Germany, meaning it's a conscious decision
- Same for "ministry"
Thomas Hueglin and Alan Fenna: Comparative Federalism:
- Swiss and Australian, respectively
- Full Professors at Laurier and Curtin, respectively; noted federalism experts; Hueglin served as a UN adviser to the Constitutional Drafting Committee of the Republic of Yemen and Fenna used to be President of the Australian Political Studies Association
- Always use "minister", never "federal minister" in the context of Austria, but do the opposite when talking about Germany, meaning they're doing it on purpose
- Same for "ministry"