Madoff fallout and translation

Last fall, investors who had lost money -- lots of it -- in the LuxAlpha Sicav-American Selection fund filed lawsuits against E&Y and UBS in Luxembourg.

The reason they had lost so much money in LuxAlpha was that the geniuses managing same had invested 95% of it with Bernard Madoff. Maybe you've heard of him?

Anyway, investors claimed that they were entitled to be made whole by UBS, which was LuxAlpha's custodian, and/or by Ernst & Young, its auditor. Unfortunately for said investors, a Luxembourg court said in a ruling on March 4 [the only date in the year that is also a command -- "march forth!"] that the investors will have to pursue their claims through the liquidator of the fund, some French-speaking equivalent of Irving Picard. The claims are otherwise "irrecevabilites," a French word that literally translates "inadmissible."

This raises an issue about the nature of translation from one language to another. In Ango-American jurisprudence, of course, "admissibility" is an evidentiary principle. A court that wants to say that it can not "receive" a certain lawsuit will call that lawsuit non-justiciable or speak of the absence of subject matter jurisdiction. So, in a translation of the French-language decision of a Luxembourg court, should "irrecevabilites" be rendered "inadmissible" or something more like "non-justiciable"? And if one opts for the latter, is one in effect smoothing out systemic differences? For example, in translating a Dostoyevsky novel that uses the term "borscht," should one render it "Campbell's soup"?

Anyway: the investors will appeal, but for the moment the defendants have won.

You may ask: what the heck kind of name is LuxAlpha Sicav? That one I can answer.

"Lux" of course refers to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, an important center for the domicile and for the administration of hedge funds.

"Alpha" is conventional finance jargon for the difference between a particular actively-managed fund's performance and that of the market. A "positive alpha" means that the investors did better than they would have done had they owned a piece of a passively managed fund that was indexed to, say, the S&P.

"Sicav" is a French-language acronym, from "la société d’investissement à capital variable," an open-ended investment company.

As Governor Duke said to Mac, "I'm glad we've had this little talk."