Comparative Law - Engaging Translation

In an era marked by processes of economic and political integration that are arguably unprecedented in their range and impact, the translation of law has assumed a new significance. Can legal rules carry identical normative implications in more than one language? Can law achieve uniformity despite needing to be rendered in many languages? How do interpreting and translation affect adjudication in a multilingual courtroom? To what extent can a given legal text make sense in a different legal culture? These questions, among others, are addressed here within a comparative legal context in which, it is demonstrated, translation issues are a central feature of the contemporary legal landscape.

In an era marked by processes of economic, political and legal integration that are arguably unprecedented in their range and impact, the translation of law has assumed a significance which it would be hard to overstate. The following situations are typical. A French law school is teaching French law in the English language to foreign exchange students. Some US legal scholars are exploring the possibility of developing a generic or transnational constitutional law. German judges are referring to foreign law in a criminal case involving an honour killing committed in Germany with a view to ascertaining the relevance of religious prescriptions. European lawyers are actively working on the creation of a common private law to be translated into the 24 official languages of the European Union. Since 2004, the World Bank has been issuing reports ranking the attractiveness of different legal cultures for doing business. All these examples raise in one way or the other the matter of translation from a comparative legal perspective. However, in today’s globalised world where the need to communicate beyond borders arises constantly in different guises, many comparatists continue not to address the issue of translation. This edited collection of essays brings together leading scholars from various cultural and disciplinary backgrounds who draw on fields such as translation studies, linguistics, literary theory, history, philosophy or sociology with a view to promoting a heightened understanding of the complex translational implications pertaining to comparative law, understood both in its literal and metaphorical senses.