Versions
- 2022-11-08 (2)
- 2017-12-06 (1)
Keywords
legal translators’ agency
cognitive processes
tesseract model
outstitutional contexts
legal systems
legal genres
fitness- for-purpose
language and law
How to Cite
Abstract
Legal translation is a highly skilled task. It has even been described as the “ultimate linguistic challenge” (Harvey 2002: 177). However, law firms or corporations that procure translations from self- employed translation practitioners often find the intricacies of the task difficult to perceive. Following extensive fieldwork examining how legal translation is commissioned and performed in ‘outstitutional’ contexts, I have developed a multidimensional model which illustrates the legal translator’s textual agency, aimed at conveying the complexities of translation performance to clients and other stakeholders. It may also serve to train fledgling legal translators, and to heighten practising translators’ awareness of their overall task. The impetus for the model sprang primarily from findings of serious information asymmetry and goal divergence in the market, and evidence that actors involved do not grasp (a) the need for legal translators to be fully briefed, or (b) the layers of skills involved.
References
Alcaraz Varó, Enrique, and Hughes, Brian. 2002. Legal translation explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Baaij, Cornelius J. W. 2014. Legal Translation and the ‘Contamination’ of Comparative Legal Research. In Comparative Law – Engaging Translation ed. Simone Glanert, 104-122. Abingdon: Routledge.
Baker, Mona. 2001. In other words. London: Routledge. 58
Barnes, Jeffrey. 2016. How well does plain language work? A legislative perspective. Paper presented at IALS/Clarity seminar, 6 October 2016, in London, UK.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 1987. Language of the law. Language Teaching, 20, 227-234.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 2006. Legal genres. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics Volume 7 ed. Kevin Brown, 1-7. Boston: Elsevier.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 2010. Drafting Legislative Provisions: Challenges and Opportunities. The Loophole, 12, 5-15.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 2014. Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view. London: Bloomsbury.
Biel, Łucja. 2009. Organization of background knowledge structures in legal language and related translation problems. Comparative Legilinguistics 1, 176-189.
Biel, Łucja. 2010a. Corpus-Based Studies of Legal Language for Translation Purposes: Methodological and Practical Potential. In Reconceptualizing LSP. Online proceedings of the XVII European LSP Symposium 2009, ed. Carmen Heine and Jan Engberg. Aarhus: Aarhus.
Biel, Łucja. 2010b. The textual fit of legal translations: focus on collocations in translator training. In Teaching Translation and Interpreting: Challenges and Practices ed. Łukasz Bogucki and Mikołaj Deckert, 23-38. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Biel, Łucja. 2011. Professional realism in the legal translation classroom: Translation competence and translator competence. Meta, 56(1), 162-178.
Biel, Łucja. 2014. The textual fit of translated EU law: A corpus- based study of deontic modality. The Translator, 20(3), 332- 355.
Biel, Łucja, and Engberg, Jan. 2013. Research models and methods in legal translation. Linguistica Antverpiensia, 12, 1-11.
Bocquet, Claude. 1994. Pour une méthode de traduction juridique. Prilly: CB Service.
Bocquet, Claude. 2008. La traduction juridique : fondement et méthode. Brussels: De Boeck.
Cao, Deborah. 2007. Translating law. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Calderoni, Francesco. 2010. Organized crime legislation in the European Union. London: Springer.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2013. Models of what processes? Translation and Interpreting Studies, 8(2), 155-168.
Chesterman, Andrew and Wagner, Emma. 2002. Can theory help translators?: a dialogue between the ivory tower and the wordface. Manchester: St Jerome.
Cornu, Gérard. 1990. Vocabulaire juridique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Crump, David. 2002. Against plain English: The case for a functional approach to legal document preparation. Rutgers Law Journal, 33(3), 713-44.
Darling, David. 2004. The universal book of mathematics: from abracadabra to Zeno’s paradoxes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Déal, Emilie. 2004. Langue du droit et doctrine: la linguistique juridique au service de l’accessibilité internationalisée des contributions doctrinales. Meta, 34(2), 233- 265.
De Groot, Gérard-René. 2006. Legal translation. In Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, ed. Jan M. Smits, 423- 433. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Endicott, Timothy A. O. 2000. Vagueness in law. Oxford: Oxford. Engberg, Jan. 2004. Statutory Texts as Instances of Language(s): Consequences and Limitations on Interpretation. Brooklyn Law Journal, 3, 1135-1166.
Engberg, Jan. 2013. Comparative law for translation: the key to successful mediation between legal systems. In Legal translation in context: Professional issues and prospects, ed. Annabel Borja Albi and Fernando Prieti Ramos, 9-25. Bern: Peter Lang.
Février, Philippe, Linnemer, Laurent and Visser, Michael. 2004. Life and death and real estate in France: testing for asymmetric information in the viager market. Risques, 59, 2.
Flusser, Vilém. 2002. Writings. Ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik Eisel. Minneapolis: Minnesota.
Folena, Gianfranco. 1991. Volgarizzare e tradurre. Turin: Einaudi. Galdia, Marcus. 2003. Comparative law and legal translation. The European Legal Forum 1, 1-4.
Galdia, Marcus. 2009. Legal linguistics. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Gallego Hernandez, Daniel. 2012. Traducción económica y corpus: del concepto a la concordancia. Alicante: Alicante.
Garcìa Izquierdo, Isabel and Borja Albi, Annabel. 2008. A multidisciplinary approach to specialized writing and translation using a genre based multilingual corpus of specialized texts. LSP and professional communication, 8(1), 39-63.
Garrido Rodríguez, Ignacio. 2012. Translation in the Civil Service: the Case of the Spanish National Traffic Authority. Analysis of the Invoice as a Textual Genre. Sendebar, 23, 207-226.
Garrido Rodríguez, Ignacio. 2015. Macroestructura de los estatutos de sociedades alemanas y españolas: influencias legislativas y an lisis contrastivo. In Interacciones. Reflexiones en torno a la traducción e Interpretación del/al alemán, ed. María Ángeles Recio Ariza, et al. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Garzone, Giuliana. 2000. Legal and functionalist approaches: A contradiction in terms? Paper presented at Legal translation, history, theory/ies, and practice, http://www.tradulex.com/Actes2000/Garzone.pdf.
Garzone, Giuliana and Ilie, Cornelia. 2014. Introduction. In Genres and genre theory in transition, ed. Giuliana Garzone and Carmen Ilie, 7-15. Boca Raton: BrownWalker.
Gémar, Jean-Claude. 2002. Le plus et le moins-disant culturel du texte juridique. Langue, culture et equivalence. Meta, 47(2), 163- 176.
Gémar, Jean-Claude. 2012, November. De la traduction juridique à la jurilinguistique: la quête de l’équivalence. Colloque international sur La traduction dans des contextes de plurilinguisme official.
Gentzler, Edwin. 1993. Contemporary Translation Theories. London: Routledge.
Glanert, Simone and Legrand, Pierre. 2013. Foreign law in translation: if truth be told.... In Current legal issues: law and language, ed. Michael Freeman and Fiona Smith, 513-532. Oxford: Oxford.
Gotti, Maurizio. 2012. Text and genre. In The Oxford Handbook of Language and the Law, ed. Peter M. Tiersma and Laurence M. Solan, 52-66. Oxford: Oxford.
Gozdz-Roszkowski, Stanislaw. 2006. Recurrent word combinations in judicial argumentation. A corpus-based study. In Langue, Droit, Société, ed. Danuta Bartol, Anna Duszak, Hubert Izdebski and Jean-Marie Pierrel, 139-152. Nancy: Nancy.
Harvey, Malcolm. 2002. What’s so special about legal translation? Meta, 47(2), 177-185.
Hertel, Christian. 2009. An overview of legal systems. Notarius International 1(2), 128-141.
Heylen, Kris, Bond, Stephen, De Hertog, Dirk, Kockaert, Hendrik, Steurs Frieda, Vulić, Ivan. 2014. TermWise: Leveraging Big Data for Terminological Support in Legal Translation. Terminology and Knowledge Engineering, June 20, Berlin, Germany. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01005842/document.
House, Juliane. 1977. A model for assessing translation quality. Meta, 22(2), 103-109.
Jayme, Erik. 1995. La langue: risque linguistique et droit international privé. In Recueil des cours: Collected courses of The Hague Academy of International Law, 189-194. The Hague: Kluwer Law.
Kasirer, Nicolas. 2001. François Gény’s libre recherche scientifique as a Guide for Legal Translation. Louisiana Law Review, 61(2), 331-352.
Kjaer, Anne L. 2007. Phrasemes in legal texts. In Phraseologie/Phraseology: Ein internationales Hand-buch der zeitgen ssischen Forschung/An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Vol. 1, ed. Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter K hn and Neal R. Norrick, 506-516. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Kjaer, Anne L. 2008. The Every-Day Miracle of Legal Translation. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 21, 1, 67-72.
Lamalle, Sandy. 2014. Multilevel Translation Analysis of a key Legal Concept: Persona Juris and Legal Pluralism. In The Ashgate Handbook of Legal Translation, ed. Le Cheng, King Kui Sin and Anne Wagner, 299-312. Farrnham: Ashgate.
Lupoi, Maurizio. 2013. Trusts in Italy as a living comparative law laboratory. Trusts & Trustees 19, 3/4, 302-308.
Mattila, Heikki E. S. 2006. Comparative legal linguistics. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Mauro, Jacques. 1988. Au carrefour des droits et des langues : la langue applicable au contrat, le risque linguistique. Gazette du Palais, 1.214.
Mayoral Asensio, Robert. 2003. Translating official documents. Manchester: St Jerome.
McAuliffe, Karen. 2013. Precedent at the Court of Justice of the European Union: The linguistic aspect. Current Legal Issues, 15, 483-493.
Mellinkoff, David. 1963. Language of the law. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Monjean-Decaudin, Sylvie. 2010a. Approche juridique de la traduction du droit. Working Paper, CEJEC European and comparative law research center, http://cejec.u-paris10.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/smonjeandecaudin070110.doc, Accessed 25 November 2016.
Monjean-Decaudin, Sylvie. 2010b. Territorialité et extraterritorialité de la traduction du droit. Meta, 55(4), 693-711
Monjean-Decaudin, Sylvie. 2012. La traduction du droit dans la procédure judiciaire. Paris: Dalloz.
Montalt Ressurrecció, Vicent, Epeleta Piorno, Pilar and Izquierdo Garcìa, Isabel. 2008. Developing communicative and textual competence through genres. Translation Journal, 12(4).
Munday, Jeremy. 2008. Introducing translation studies. London: Routledge.
Nida, Eugene A. 1976. A framework for the analysis and evaluation of theories of translation. In Translation: Applications and Research, ed. Richard W. Brislin, 47-91. New York: Gardner Press.
Nielsen, Sandro. 1994. The bilingual LSP Dictionary: principles and Practice for legal language. T bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag T bingen.
Nord, Christiane. 1997. Translating as a purposeful activity. Manchester: St Jerome.
Phillips, Alfred. 2003. Lawyers’ language. London: Routledge. Pigeon, Louis-Philippe. 1982. La traduction juridique: L’équivalence fonctionnelle. In Langage du droit et traduction, ed. Jean- Claude Gémar, 271-281. Québec: Conseil de la langue française.
Pollman, Terrill. 2002. Building a tower of Babel or building a discipline? Talking about legal writing. Marquette Law Review, 85(4), 887-928.
Pommer, Sieglinde. 2008. Translation as Intercultural Transfer: The Case of Law. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 3(1), 17-21.
Pontrandolfo, Gianluca. 2015. Investigating judicial phraseology with COSPE: A contrastive corpus-based study. In New directions in corpus-based translation studies, ed. Claudio Fantinuoli and Federico Zanettin, 137–160. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Prieto Ramos, Fernando. 2014. Legal translation studies as interdiscipline: Scope and evolution. Meta, 59(2), 260-277.
Pym, Anthony. 2010. Exploring translation theories. London: Routledge.
Ralli, Natascia. 2009. Terminografia e comparazione giuridica: metodo, applicazioni e problematiche chiave. inTRAlinea, Specialised Translation I (Special issue).
Rogers-Glabush, Julie. 2009. IBFD International tax glossary. Amsterdam: IBFD.
Salmi-Tolonen, Tarja. 2006. From Linguistic Knowledge to Contracting Capabilities – and back again. In International Academic Symposium on Commercial Management, ed. David Lowe, 83-92. Manchester: University of Manchester.
Samuel, Geoffrey. 2014. An introduction to comparative law theory and method. Oxford: Hart.
Sandrini, Peter. 1999. Legal terminology. Some aspects for a new methodology. Hermes, 22, 101-112.
Šarčević, Susan. 1997. New approach to legal translation. The Hague: Kluwer Law International.
Šarčević, Susan. 2000. Legal translation and translation theory: a receiver-oriented approach. Paper presented at Legal translation, history, theory/ies, and practice, February 17-19. http://tradulex.org/Actes2000/sarcevic.pdf.
Šarčević, Susan. 2012. Challenges to the legal translator. In The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law, ed. Peter M. Tiersma and Laurence M. Solan, 187-199. Oxford: Oxford.
Schäffner, Christina. 2004. Metaphor and translation. Journal of pragmatics, 36(7), 1253-1269.
Schroth, Peter W. 1986. Legal translation. American Journal of Comparative Law, 34, 47-65.
Scott, Juliette R. (forthcoming). A Covert-Overt Cline for Legal Translation.
Scott, Juliette R. 2016. Optimising the performance of outsourced legal translation. Currently unpublished doctoral thesis.
Smith, Michael R. 2007. Levels of metaphor in persuasive legal writing. Mercer Law Review, 58, 919-947.
Smith, Sylvia A. 1995. Culture clash: Anglo-American case law and German civil law in translation. In Translation and the law, ed. Marshall Morris, 179-200. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1988/1995. Translation studies: An integrated approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Solan, Laurence M. 2011. Linguistic issues in statutory interpretation. Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 254. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1950310.
Strandvik, Ingemar. 2015. On Quality in EU Multilingual Lawmaking. In Language and Culture in EU Law: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Susan Šarčević, 141-165. Farnham: Ashgate.
Sutskever, Ilya, Vinyals, Oriol and Le, Quoc V. 2014. Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 27 (NIPS 2014), ed. Zoubin Ghahramani, Max Welling, Corinna Cortes, Neil D. Lawrence, and Kilian Q. Weinberger. http://papers.nips.cc/book/advances-in-neural-information-processing-systems-27-2014
Swales, John. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge.
Tiersma, Peter M. 2000. Legal language. London: University of Chicago Press.
Toury, Gideon. 2012. Descriptive translation studies – and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Trosborg, Anna. 1997. Rhetorical strategies in legal language: discourse analysis of statutes and contracts. T bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag T bingen.
Vespaziani, Alberto. 2009, September. Towards a Hermeneutical Approach to Legal Metaphor. In ISSL Papers Special Issue. Dossier on Law and Literature. A Discussion on Purposes and Method. Proceedings of the Special WS on Law and Literature held at 24th IVR World Conference in Beijing, China, ed. Paola Mittica, 128-136. Bologna: Bologna. http://www.lawandliterature.org/area/documenti/Law%20and%20Literature%20%20IVR%20WS%20Proceedings%202010.pdf.
Yunus, Kamariah B., & Awab, Su’ad. 2011. Collocational competence among Malaysian undergraduate law students. Malaysian Journal of ELT Research, 7(1), 151-202.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
When submitting a paper the author agrees to the following publishing agreement and processing personal data.
PUBLICATION AGREEMENT, COPYRIGHT LICENSE, PERSONAL DATA PROCESSING CONSENT
This is a publication agreement and copyright license (“Agreement”) regarding a written manuscript currently submitted via Pressto platform
(“Article”) to be published in Comparative Legilinguistics International Journal for Legal Communication (“Journal”).
The parties to this Agreement are:
the Author or Authors of the submitted article (individually, or if more than one author, collectively, “Author”) and Comparative Legilinguistics International Journal for Legal Communication (“Publisher”), address al. Niepodległości 4, 61-874 Poznań, represented by its editor in chief Aleksandra Matulewska.
§1. LICENSE OF COPYRIGHT
a) The Author and the Publisher agree that the Author grants a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which is incorporated herein by reference and is further specified at Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0 copyright license in the Article to the general public.
b) The Author grants to the Publisher a royalty-free, worldwide nonexclusive license to publish, reproduce, display, distribute, translate and use the Article in any form, either separately or as part of a collective work, including but not limited to a nonexclusive license to publish the Article in an issue of the Journal, copy and distribute individual reprints of the Article, authorize reproduction of the entire Article in another publication, and authorize reproduction and distribution of the Article or an abstract thereof by means of computerized retrieval systems (such as Westlaw, Lexis and SSRN). The Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in the Article, and all rights not expressly granted in this Agreement.
c) The Author grants to the Publisher the power to assign, sublicense or otherwise transfer any and all licenses expressly granted to the Publisher under this Agreement.
d) Republication. The Author agrees to require that the Publisher be given credit as the original publisher in any republication of the Article authorized by the Author. If the Publisher authorizes any other party to republish the Article under the terms of paragraphs 1c and 1 of this Agreement, the Publisher shall require such party to ensure that the Author is credited as the Author.
§2. EDITING OF THE ARTICLE
a) The Author agrees that the Publisher may edit the Article as suitable for publication in the Journal. To the extent that the Publisher’s edits amount to copyrightable works of authorship, the Publisher hereby assigns all right, title, and interest in such edits to the Author.
§3. WARRANTIES
a) The Author represents and warrants that to the best of the Author’s knowledge the Article does not defame any person, does not invade the privacy of any person, and does not in any other manner infringe upon the rights of any person. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the Publisher against all such claims.
b) The Author represents and warrants that the Author has full power and authority to enter into this Agreement and to grant the licenses granted in this Agreement.
c) The Author represents and warrants that the Article furnished to the Publisher has not been published previously. For purposes of this paragraph, making a copy of the Article accessible over the Internet, including, but not limited to, posting the Article to a database accessible over the Internet, does not constitute prior publication so long as the as such copy indicates that the Article is not in final form, such as by designating such copy to be a “draft,” a “working paper,” or “work-in-progress”. The Author agrees to hold harmless the Publisher, its licensees and distributees, from any claim, action, or proceeding alleging facts that constitute a breach of any warranty enumerated in this paragraph.
§4. TERM
a) The agreement was concluded for an unspecified time.
§5. PAYMENT
a) The Author agrees and acknowledges that the Author will receive no payment from the Publisher for use of the Article or the licenses granted in this Agreement.
b) The Publisher agrees and acknowledges that the Publisher will not receive any payment from the Author for publication by the Publisher.
§6. ENTIRE AGREEMENT
a) This Agreement supersedes any and all other agreements, either oral or in writing, between the Author and the Publisher with respect to the subject of this Agreement. This Agreement contains all of the warranties and agreements between the parties with respect to the Article, and each party acknowledges that no representations, inducements, promises, or agreements have been made by or on behalf of any party except those warranties and agreements embodied in this Agreement.
b) In all cases not regulated by this Agreement, legal provisions of Polish Copyright Act and Polish Civil Code shall apply.
c) Any disputes arising from the enforcement of obligations connected with this Agreement shall be resolved by a court competent for the headquarters of the Publisher.
d) Any amendments or additions to the Agreement must be made in writing and signed by authorised representative of both parties, otherwise being ineffective.
e) This Agreement is signed electronically and the submission of the article via the PRESSto platform is considered as the conclusion of the Agreement by the Author and the Publisher.
f) Clause for consent to the processing of personal data - general
g) The Author shall give his or her consent to the processing of their personal data in accordance with the Act of 10 May 2018 on the protection of personal data and Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of persons physical in connection with the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46 / EC (General Data Protection Regulation) for the purpose and in connection with making publications available on the PRESSto scientific journals platform and DeGruyter platform, guaranteeing the security of services rendered, and improving them.
I HAVE READ AND AGREE FULLY WITH THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT.
The Author The Publisher