Content: introduction. I. Chapter. Legal texts


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LEGAL TRANSLETION

CONCLUSIONS 
Through this work, straddling, like its subject, between the legal and the 
linguistic world, we tried to shed lights on the appropriate approach one should have 
to legal translation in order to overstep the traps it sets out. We saw how it does 
represent a struggle for the legal translator, who finds himself facing one of the most 
delicate and tricky translation- and law-related issues, but most of all we saw why it 
is so, and which are the strategies to adopt in order to overcome these innumerable 
difficulties.
We started analysing the tangible side of the story, what we see, read, hear, study 
and what we are, at the end of the day, bound from: legal texts. We went through its 
main features and the different typologies we may deal with, looking at their 
specificities: international agreements, national legislations and private legal 
documents. Despite all differences in drafting strategies, we agreed on the fact that 
the most important and the first thing to establish before starting a translation is its 
function, i.e. whether the result of the translation process is going to be an authentic 
and authoritative version of the original (prescriptive function) or not (informative 
function). In the first case the translation will be nothing but law, aiming to the same 
purposes and producing the same legal effects, and as a consequence the source text 
will cease of being of any value for the receiver of the new one. If the translation has 
a prescriptive, i.e. normative, purpose, the attention the translator should pay is 
extremely high due to the legal consequences the application of that document will 
have.
The distinction between authoritative and non-authoritative texts is important 
especially when coming to interpretation and in particular when doubts about 
10
Direzione Generale Dell’interpretazione, Interpretare e tradurre per l’Europa, Ufficio Pubblicazioni dell’Unione 
Europea, Lussemburgo COSMAI D. (2004), 


31 
interpretation arise. Only 154 the language versions that have been officially 
declared authentic, usually by means of a language clause, can be consulted in order 
to ascertain the intended meaning the legislator had in mind when drafting that text. 
The translator may have a role in this phase since it may be referred to, if the 
uncertainties may derive from translation. This introduces us to another topic of this 
work, namely the role of the legal translators, which could be reduced to a role of 
intermediate between conceiver and receiver of the legal texts, but that actually goes 
well beyond that.
The translator is indeed more a second producer of the legal text since, as 
already said, the outcome will be a new text, independent from the original and the 
one and only that will produce legal effects for its addressee. The responsibility of 
the translator, towards both the source and the target text, is non-negligible and leads 
us to question whether maybe, more than a pure translator, he/she should be a legal 
expert able to evaluate and understand precisely the implications and potential 
consequences of the text. We came to the conclusion a legal expert, even if bilingual 
in the best hypothesis, would lack of the linguistic/translational competences, 
necessary to attain an accurate clone of the original language version, and that 
therefore, the optimal solution would be a mutual cooperation between the two, if 
not a person equally skilled in both disciplines. 
After having dealt with theoretical aspects of legal translation in general and in 
particular its being system and language bound, multidisciplinary and influenced by 
context and function, we came to the heart of the matter, that is to say the challenges 
and problems legal translation poses to the person in charge of it, which derive from 
the nature itself of the discipline, with both law and language posing limits to his/her 
work. On top of that, as a result of the union of two disciplines it seems to have 
inherited the weaker and 155 defective genes of both, doubling the problems and the 
ties law and language set out when kept separate.
So first of all we went through the expression of all these difficulties: legal 
language, stressing out the fact it is a language for special purpose and that, to make 
things more complicated, resembles the ordinary one, potentially posing problems 


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of ambiguity. We questioned ourselves on whether it should be considered a full-
fledged language or just a branch of the ordinary one, but after analysing both 
hypothesis we concluded it may be considered a language on its own, responding to 
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