emission control

Which translation, when

Why

Emission control is the conventional English label for the German Immissionsschutz, and the pair is a structural mismatch rather than a lexical one. German law works with two nouns for two directions of the same phenomenon. Section 3 Abs. 3 BImSchG defines Emissionen as the air pollution, noise, vibration, light, heat, radiation and similar phenomena proceeding from an installation; § 3 Abs. 2 defines Immissionen as those same phenomena acting on people, wild and domestic animals and plants, on soil, water, the atmosphere and the climate and on cultural and other property. The smoke leaving the chimney is an Emission; the same smoke arriving in the garden next door is an Immission. English uses emission for the source side and has no established word for the receiving side, so immission appears only as a technical borrowing in translated texts and the receiving side is otherwise paraphrased as ambient levels, impact or effects. The consequence for translation is that the German field is named after the direction English cannot name. Section 3 Abs. 1 BImSchG then supplies the operative threshold: schädliche Umwelteinwirkungen, harmful environmental effects, are Immissionen which by their nature, extent or duration are capable of causing danger, substantial disadvantage or substantial nuisance to the general public or the neighbourhood. Everything the statute does with installations follows from that arriving effect rather than from the output as such, which is why limits appear in two forms, an Emissionsgrenzwert set at the source and an Immissionsrichtwert measured where people live. A translation that renders both as emission limit collapses the two measuring points on which German permit decisions turn.

Typical mistakes

• Emissionen leave the installation and Immissionen arrive at the affected person or property, § 3 Abs. 2 und 3 BImSchG, so using one word for both loses the direction.
• The statutory threshold is the harmful environmental effect measured at the point of impact, so describing German law as output regulation misstates its structure.
• Emissionsgrenzwert and Immissionsrichtwert are values at different measuring points, so rendering both as emission limit makes a permit decision impossible to follow.

What matters

Translating a German environmental report: each occurrence should be sorted into the emitting and the receiving direction, limit values kept apart by their measuring point, and immission paraphrased rather than borrowed where the target text is English.

Examples