The article deals with the question of the untranslatability of legal concepts and traditional examples of translations, such as contract / contrat / contratto / Vertrag and property / proprietà / propriété / Eigentum. It aims also at pointing out that while within the Western Legal Tradition it is customary to think of law primarily in written terms, in other legal traditions, such as in China or in Africa, this might not be the case, as the unwritten character of customary rules may prevail in the law in action. Furthermore, legal rules, whether oral or written, might be profoundly influenced by invisible patterns of ordering that need to be revealed before the rules are translated. Hence a necessary task in each legal translation process is to understand the culture in which the rules to be translated are rooted, an understanding that in some cases may prove of extreme importance. Lastly, the article looks at the myth of equivalence, a myth that seems to become “a chimera when legal translation has to face the numerous issues and challenges connected with European multilingualism”. Pozzo concludes by pointing out that in the European legal context, English is used as a “neutral or descriptive language” associated with a classic civil law background; it has reached the status of a lingua francaat the cost of becoming a Continental legal English which differs from British legal English. In the near future a new translation task could then prove necessary: translating EU-English into British English.
The myth of equivalence in legal translation
POZZO, BARBARA
2014-01-01
Abstract
The article deals with the question of the untranslatability of legal concepts and traditional examples of translations, such as contract / contrat / contratto / Vertrag and property / proprietà / propriété / Eigentum. It aims also at pointing out that while within the Western Legal Tradition it is customary to think of law primarily in written terms, in other legal traditions, such as in China or in Africa, this might not be the case, as the unwritten character of customary rules may prevail in the law in action. Furthermore, legal rules, whether oral or written, might be profoundly influenced by invisible patterns of ordering that need to be revealed before the rules are translated. Hence a necessary task in each legal translation process is to understand the culture in which the rules to be translated are rooted, an understanding that in some cases may prove of extreme importance. Lastly, the article looks at the myth of equivalence, a myth that seems to become “a chimera when legal translation has to face the numerous issues and challenges connected with European multilingualism”. Pozzo concludes by pointing out that in the European legal context, English is used as a “neutral or descriptive language” associated with a classic civil law background; it has reached the status of a lingua francaat the cost of becoming a Continental legal English which differs from British legal English. In the near future a new translation task could then prove necessary: translating EU-English into British English.
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