Constitutional law

One entry here looks as though it needs no learning, and it is the one most likely to be mistranslated. In ordinary and commercial English an indemnity is money or security against a loss: an insurer indemnifies, a contract carries an indemnity clause. Die Indemnität in the Basic Law pays nobody. It is the rule that a member of the Bundestag may never be taken to court or otherwise called to account outside the chamber for a vote cast or a statement made in it, with defamatory insults excepted. English calls the idea parliamentary privilege. Both words go back to Latin indemnitas, and the older English sense of an act exempting people from penalties is the closer relative, but a translator who writes indemnity will be read as talking about compensation. Keep it apart from die Immunität as well: that one protects a member from arrest and prosecution, and parliament can lift it; die Indemnität cannot be lifted at all.