Content: introduction. I. Chapter. Legal texts

particular needs, different from the ones of the everyday language, governed by 
different rules and made up by a special vocabulary.
How to justify the presence of identical words in both languages, then? Simple, 
technically speaking they are not the same word, they just share their graphic and/or 
phonetic form, but since their meaning and acceptation is different they cannot be 
considered the same. It may sound as a stretching, but it is born from the same 
conviction and rational extremism that made me say that, when speaking of legal 
translation, pushing all the considerations we have made to the limit, translation does 
not exist.
The actual stretching, to say it all, is translation itself, especially when trying to 
translate a text produced by a legal system into the language of a legal system, that 
is not only different (it happens virtually always) but culturally distant from the 
source one. Assuming perfect equivalence and one-to-one conceptual 
correspondence do not exist (except for multilingual countries) it comes as no 
surprise, translation is at the end of the day, basically a process of adaptation and 
compromise. 
It is forced and artificial, as we saw, just as comparative law, looking for 
common points and equivalences among legal systems. But this does not mean it is 
superfluous, impossible or wrong, on the contrary people have the right and are 
supposed to know the rules that bind them, this is why it is not only useful but 156 
necessary. The two concrete situations I chose to briefly analyse at the end of this 
work, i.e. the European Union and the United Nation Organisation, are just two 
examples of this, brought under the light to see in practice the context in which the 
legal translator has to work and which are the legally binding rules he/she is asked 
to conform to.
Despite all this, once more, translation is a matter of faith and of accepting 
compromises, the receiver should then trust the translator, if doubts should arise, and 

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if he/she feels the need of clarifications, the only possible solution is to turn to the 
original version of the text, hoping to find there the answer to his/her questions. Still, 
this is possible only if he/she is skilled enough to understand the source language, if 
not, faith is the only way.
After all these considerations, paradoxes and explanations we could dare say, 
the aim of this work, after all, was awareness. It should serve both as torch and 
magnifying glass, helping a disoriented outsider finding the right path through the 
thick woods of legal translation. Light to see what has always been there, but covered 
by the darkness of complex words and enigmatic sentences, and lens, to go deeper 
and become conscious of non-evident mechanisms and elements composing it. Its 
purpose was first of all making the reader more sensible to law by being more 
sensible to language and all its components, and then trying to give him/her the 
instruments to approach the subject the right way.