EU Translation Legal Translation in Multilingual Lawmaking (original) (raw)

EU LANGUAGE BARRIERS -CHALLENGES IN TRANSLATING LEGAL TEXTS

The 20th International Conference the Knowledge-Based Organization , 2014

The article scrutinizes the variety of languages in the European Union. The linguistic unification of Europe is no longer a necessary requisite to overcome language barriers. The identity of Europe can only be represented adequately by respecting its diversity. Therefore, it is only the promotion of all national languages that will allow us to preserve the richness of the culture of which these languages are the privileged means of expression. The multilingual policy adopted by Europe is thus a critical test for the European Union. Translation is an inevitable part of language learning and teaching as well as a challenge for the European Court of Justice to interpret certain legal texts. Increasing globalization demands the knowledge of English for special purposes, i.e. Legal English in order to translate texts clearly, accurately, unambiguously, through cohesion links and means.

The text and context of EU directives: implications for translators 1

Contrastive studies of statutory legislation are very scarce worldwide. Research in legal language has mainly concentrated on adjectival law leading to linguistic insights regarding powerful versus powerless speech, fragmented versus narrative testimony, the effect on jurors of simultaneous and overlapping speech, the use of leading, suggestive or improper questions in the courtroom, etc. Language of the substantive law has so far received considerably less attention from linguists, although there is a general tendency in academic endeavours towards interdisciplinary studies. Linguistic analyses of substantive law have elucidated issues such as how to make existing or future statutes clearer, without loss of content (i.e. document design) or how law students can be taught to process legislation. The present article analyses the specific functional, linguistic and communicative characteristics of the legal genre from an applied linguist's perspective in the context of European legal texts, as representing a unique set of features and conditions. It looks at the linguistic situation in Europe and the language policy in the EU with special emphasis on the translation regime of EU institutions. The participants in the communication and the special role of the translator in the law making process in the EU are discussed. Resumen Los estudios contrastivos sobre legislación parlamentaria a nivel transnacional son muy escasos. Hasta ahora, el interés investigador se ha centrado en cuestiones de derecho adjetivo, como el estudio del discurso de poder, las deposiciones testimoniales fragmentadas y las narrativas, la influencia sobre el

Theoretical and methodological challenges in researching EU legal translation

Legal Translation. Current Issues and Challenges in Research, Methods and Applications , 2019

The objective of the paper is, first, to map key theoretical and methodological challenges in researching legal translation in the multilingual EU context, and, secondly, to operationalise variables which may help to model EU legal translation. EU translation is, on the one hand, a theoretically and empirically attractive field of research and, on the other hand, a methodologi-cally complex one. The multitude of factors which affect EU legal translation, including political , procedural and institutional factors makes it difficult to single out relevant variables and control them in research. It is proposed to operationalise EU translation through five interrelated axes: institutional, political, supranational, legal and multilingual ones. Additionally, EU legal translation is operationalised from the perspective of fundamental intertextual relations through the following dimensions: the concordance, the continuity and the fit.

Legal Translation vs. Legal Certainty in EU Law

This chapter primarily deals with the numerous and different challenges of legal translation in the process of legal approximation of the MS laws with the EU law. By using practical examples, the author demonstrates how and to what extent legal translation affects conceptual understanding of legal texts. Mistranslations of the EU acquis into different MS languages, problems with translation during MS accession negotiations, translation errors in language versions of directives, regulations, CJEU judgments and other sources of EU law published in the Official Journal of the European Union, different conceptual understanding and legal application of legal expressions arising from the EU acquis in the MS, different meanings of the “same” linguistic EU and MS legal terms etc., are only some of the issues in which language and law collide. Incorrect use of language in this context often leads to incorrect application of law and thus to wrong legal consequences, thereby bringing legal certainty seriously in question. This is why one should continue to raise the already existing awareness among both linguists and lawyers of the implications of these issues in legal practice and of the importance of the role of language in law in general.

Theoretical and Logical Prerequisites for Legal Translation

2018

The main research aim is to look at how formal principles of legal theory and logic across national jurisdictions affect translation of legislative texts. In the analyzed institutional legal context, official legislative drafting guidelines comprise the canon of good/quality legislation, universal and binding for each legal system. One of my research tasks is to juxtapose Polish legislative drafting guidelines with the European Union drafting guidelines, as well as with selected common law bill drafting manuals to see how certain parameters affect the way we process legislative texts in translation, and how different legal cultures influence the way we interpret legal texts. The qualitative analysis encompasses the legislative recommendations as to the formulation of legal definitions, the use of conjunctions, negation, and the grammatical category of aspect, mood and tense. Attempts are also made to search for any cross-cultural patterns of the analyzed parameters of normative text...

EU Legal Culture and Translation, a special issue of The International Journal of Language & Law

This article introduces the special issue of JLL on EU legal culture and translation. The introduction gives an overview of the papers comprised in the special issue and provides the theoretical background to set the scene for the discussion in the papers. The special issue is a follow-up on the panel organised at the Language and Law in a World of Media, Globalisation and Social Conflicts conference at the University of Freiburg. We argue that the EU legal culture is a perfect case in point for the study of the intersection between law and language. Due to the extreme degree of mediation and filtering of law through the EU's official languages, the EU legal culture emerges through translation as a hybrid supranational pan-European construct with mutual dependencies on national legal cultures. The contributions to the special issues address various aspects of the law and language intersection in the EU context: the role of English as the EU's lingua franca, the impact of national legal cultures on legal translation, strategic ambiguity and its interpretation by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the impact of EU integration on legal languages, and finally, framing and ideology in EU legal translation. Overall, by approaching the EU legal culture from various perspectives, this special issue refines our understanding of how the EU legal culture is affected by multilingual translation.