It’s not groundbreaking news that legal translation requires the assistance of professionals with proven expertise in both law and translation. In fact, there’s a term in the profession that encapsulates the challenges and recommended methods to properly conduct legal translations: “jurilinguistics.”
What is Jurilinguistics?
The term was first used by Jean-Claude Gémar in a Canadian academic text1 to describe “the difficulties that jurists and translators must face when they are called upon to work together, to try and juxtapose two experiences, to bring together two solitudes.” His book of work aimed to connect the disciplines of language translation and law to better prepare a generation of professionals in Canada to manage the growing need to draft legislative rules around their bicultural legal system. Today, the term continues to be used to reflect upon challenges and issues existing when the dynamics of language and the legal system intersect.
One such expert in the field, Jan Engberg, proposes that legal terms and translations must be based on the shared knowledge, assumptions, and culture of a specific community. His theories around legal translation insist that a thorough understanding of culture, the society’s approach to law, and accepted interpersonal communication meanings must all be considered for accurate translation.
In an interview for The Journal of Specialised Translation, Engberg explains his theory that legal translation is actually a process of knowledge mediation. His theory posits that we must consider the “relevant part of a foreign legal system in a format that is conceivable in the target legal system” and to do that we need to understand the similarities and differences of the two legal systems. Engberg’s process involves having a thorough understanding of the work in the original language, drafting a translation in the target language, and then taking an in-depth look at how that draft would likely be understood by a person in the target language to determine if it will be an accurate translation or if further refinement is needed.
Lawrence Solan provides the field with another important consideration in legal translation. According to Solan, artificial intelligence and other technology-based solutions for interpretation are not acceptable for legal translations because the depth of contextual understanding required for accuracy is beyond the scope and ability of such methods. Solan believes interdisciplinary efforts between law and linguistic professionals are necessary to fully understand legal issues and consequently, to provide complete and accurate translations. In other words, laws are not as black and white as we assume them to be—hence the reason why different judge and juries have differing views when applying them.
Solan provides an example to illustrate his case. In a 1993 Supreme Court Case, Smith v United States, a decision was reviewed where Smith had been prosecuted according to a statute that made it a crime to “use a firearm during and in relation to a drug-trafficking crime.” Seems simple, right? What actually happened though complicates the interpretation. Smith had been arrested while attempting to trade an unloaded machine gun for cocaine. He appealed the case to the Supreme Court because the word “use” in this statute is ambiguous. In the end, six of the Supreme Court Justices decided his action did fall under the ordinary meaning of “use a firearm,” yet Justice Scalia provided his dissenting opinion that “use a firearm” means to use it as a weapon, not to use it as an object of value.2 While this illustration shows the difficulty deciphering the meaning of a term within the same language, the challenge only intensifies when a legal term must be translated into a second, target language.
What does this mean for you?
When your work requires legal translations, it’s best to partner with a professional translation team that has both the legal and language expertise in the original and target languages. That’s not just advice you’ll get from translation services looking to book your business; rather, that’s the advice you’ll get from academic scholars who spend their lives studying the needs and impacts of legal translation around the world.
When you have important legal documents that require translation, trust in the professional services of The Perfect Translation. Our work comes with certification required for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, university and high school enrollments, and other local, state, and federal government official uses. We provide qualified services with the assistance of legal professionals for documents associated with immigration, business, real estate, financial, academic, legal, and medical. Contact us today to get a free quote and learn more about how we can serve you.
Gémar, Jean-Claude (ed). 1982. Langage du droit et Traduction: Essais de Jurilinguistique. The Language of the Law and Translation. Essays on Jurilinguistics. Montreal: Linguatech. ↩
Solan, Lawrence. (2020). Corpus Linguistics as a Method of Legal Interpretation: Some Progress, Some Questions. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique. 33. 10.1007/s11196-020-09707-8. ↩
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