Incur in delay ... onli in da Pilipins

My professor in several subjects, Judge Mein Paredes, was fond of telling students that the Revised Penal Code contained several mistranslation from Español to English. There are, of course, several examples cited by textbook authors.

How about the New Civil Code?

I think due to imperfect translation the NCC has given birth to a few Filipinism in law. I discussed one in a previous post.

Here's another one:

To someone who grows up in English as a second language "incur in delay" is somehow not quite all right. If you google or bing the phrase "incur in delay" the results would be Philippine sites mostly citing Supreme Court decisions or Philippine law books. US Supreme Court decisions do not use the phrase.

So how did this Filipinism creep into Philippine law? Since the Philippine Civil Code is mostly borrowings from the Spanish Civil Code we may find out if we look into the original.

At the end of Article 1169 there is this: (1100a). It means that the Article corresponds to Articulo 1100 of the Codigo Civil; the letter a denotes the Civil Code Commission has amended the article when it was included in the New Civil Code.

Here's the article in the Codigo Civil (which can be downloaded here):

And here's the official translation by the Ministerio de Justicia of Spain:

Instead of "delay", the Ministerio de Justicia used "default" which according to De Leon and others is the more appropriate term. Just the same, the phrase is awkward. We can now see that the phrase resulted from a word for word translation.

I think the better and idiomatic translation is:

                                    

which is found here (click on the image to get to the download site):

The more idiomatic equivalent in English of incurren en mora and its derivatives, according to Linguee,  are late payments,  in arrears, comes into default, shall be in default, etc. The word incurren is not translated at all.

Vitug correctly used the phrase here:

Also De Leon here:

But they both revert to "incur in delay" in the rest of their discussions of Art. 1169.

BTW, mora is not Spanish but a  Latin term used in Roman law to mean "in delay", or "in default" according to  USLegal.  Delay in Spanish is demora while default is defecto.

We can forgive the Civil Code Commissioners. They were more conversant with Español than English. Sometimes they carry Spanish prepositions into English. It can be clumsy, however, to translate, say, consiste en  as consists in, right?

So, all together now: Not onli in da Pilipins but also en Espanya tambien!

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