Translation and Law
On St. Jerome’s Day 2012, the specific issue of the relationship between translation and law has formed the subject of a lecture at NHH, Bergen. Law is present in many texts, and legal translators will, in their practice, apply a special perspective characterized by a duplicity of views when approaching them. In the scholarly talk of “translation and the law”, the focus is on two different academic disciplines – Translation Studies and Comparative Law. They do specific research – either on translation theories or on legal systems. And the relationship between both concepts – law and translation – is somewhat unclear at first sight. We might split it up into various questions: 1) What is law, can we translate it? 2) Where is translation in the field of law? 3) What are the special problems of translation here? 1 The purpose of law Law according to its purpose is a system of social convention defined by legislation that regulates the orderly living together of people within their culture. It has been created and developed in history. All aspects of life – in dealing with offence and crime, in trade, in family affairs, in administration, in education, etc. – are governed by law and legislation. The fields where such rules apply are both national and international. And today, there is even global interaction in economy and in the upcoming of hybrid societies, and various concepts of law confront each other. We cannot translate “law” as such. What we can do at first is to compare legal systems. Comparative law is an important field of research today and it concentrates on the differences in the legal concepts. At first sight, the human values seem to be the same for all peoples in the world: internal peace, justice, equality of persons, public order, freedom of speech and of religion, recognized education, punishment of crimes, etc. But the respective ideas are not identical everywhere and their legal treatment is different, according to the cultural background. The difference between existing legal systems is mainly visible in the central concepts regarding those values. The link between both areas of research – Comparative Law and Translation Studies – is the fact that law is deposited, handed down and interpreted within texts, by language. “The law is alive in language” (Arntz 1986: 286), and this is the link to other questions regarding translation. There are texts in various fields of law such as civil, penal, trade, administrative, family, international, European law, etc. We find legal language here, and the translator will approach texts with a double perspective: regarding law and regarding linguistic features. The legal backgrounds in different cultures are decisive. 2 Various legal backgrounds and function of translation There is the well-known difference between the Common Law in the Anglo-Saxon countries with its old history of case law decisions, and the written law in most of the countries on the