Category: Conferences

As a follow up to the post from the other day, here are the details of how to access the event on the Quality of Law-making in Greece:

“The link to the IAL Athens conference on the new Greek model for law-making (including transposition), organised by the General Secretariat for Legal and Constitutional Affairs led by GS Dr Koutnatzis, and with contributions from the Prime Minister, and The Minister for the State Prof. Gerapetritis is:
https://lnkd.in/dy6if_Y
Please press on the icon “Virtual Room ARISTOTLE”. This opens the webpage with the video player. The direct link is:
https://lnkd.in/dRB5dYc
You may select the English or Greek version of the webpage by clicking on the flag at the top of the page. The conference will be in English.
Attendance is free worldwide.
The conference will be recorded and the recording will be available for three months”.

Thanks to Prof. Helen Xanthaki, one of the organisers, for sharing the details.

You can access the full programme here.

One of next week’s highlights plans to be the 2-day conference hosted by the International Association of Legislation and the Greek Secretariat for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs (11-12 February 2021). To my mind, it’s relevant to all of us who translate legal documents.

Given the COVID-19 restrictions, the event will be online.

It’s completely in English, so open to a broad international audience. While the focus may be on the Greek model, the aim is to explore how that model could be used by other countries.

It’s free to attend and the zoom link will be available in a couple of days. I’ll update the blogpost when the link becomes available.

Key themes that will be explored at the conference which I think are particularly relevant for those of us who translate legal documents are:

  • better law-making processes and better legislative drafting, which are/should be topics of interest to legal translators who have to regularly translate legislation;
  • how transposition of EU legislation into national legal orders can be improved. Again that’s a topic relevant to legal translators because it can add another layer of complication to the already complicated task of translating legislation;
  • how civil law systems like Greece can learn from common law systems (and vice versa), because we have to bridge those divides all day every day as translators of legal texts; and
  • how important it is for citizens/businesses to have access to the law in language they understand (and by extension how important it is for foreigners interacting with legal systems to have access to translated law), which is part of our core mission as legal translators.

Promises to be an interesting couple of days.

You can access the full programme here.

The call for proposals for “Jurilinguistics III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” has been extended to 18 March.

If you work in the fields of legal translation/interpreting, and have something interesting to say about them, the training of legal translators, or terminology resources in those fields, do consider submitting a paper. The last two editions in Seville were great. The third edition will be in Cambridge later this year (1-2 October 2020). Jurtrans will be there, and hopefully I’ll be presenting a paper.

The Crépeau Centre, in collaboration with the Network of Jurilinguistics Centres, has just announced the programme for the 12th Summer Institute of Jurilinguistics to be held at McGill University’s Faculty of Law on  15 June 2018.

summer institute of jurilinguistics

Continue Reading..

On  Thursday, 21 September, the University of Birmingham will host a seminar on ” Law, translation and migration: an enlightening relationship”. The event is free but requires pre-registration. The announcement about the event and the full programme are reproduced below:

“Challenges of legal translation have existed for a long time in international law and international relations. However, the intense process of globalization since the latter half of the 20th century has led to a rapid increase of international treaties and agreements, regional governance, international organizations, NGOs and courts as well as growing reliance on international arbitration.

Much of this globalized legal work is performed through translation. In spite of its long history and recent proliferation, legal translation remains underexplored, particularly from a socio-legal perspective. In fact, research on the intersection of law and translation has tended to concentrate on a rather limited agenda with broader issues being neglected. Therefore, migration is an appropriate and innovative lens to pursue this broader investigation and to tackle the following key issues: what are the various effects of globalisation on this intersection? What is the impact of legal translation on the acceptance of concepts and ideas into other (legal) cultures? What are the effects of the ‘translated’ word on the perception of the very phenomena it portrays?

This seminar will not only further our understanding of the intersection of law and translation, but it will advance knowledge and analysis on migration, an issue central to our times. By addressing the intersection of law and translation in this way, it will  reveal novel questions, effects or links to migration, thus advancing the intellectual agenda of the socio-legal community.”

Programme

Morning

Workshop 1 – Language and migration – A complex relationship

Professor Ann-Marie Fortier – University of Lancaster (Department of sociology):
‘On (not) speaking English: colonial legacies in language requirements for British citizenship’ 

Professor Eleanor Spaventa – University of Durham (School of Law):
“Language and the internal market”

Professor François Grin – Université de Genève (Faculty of translation and interpreting)
“Language, mobility and inclusion in the EU: the MIME project”

Workshop 2 – Portrayal of the nexus translation and migration

Professor Lucja Biel – University of Warsaw (Faculty of applied linguistics):
‘Translation and the law: A case study of a corpus of (legal) translation on migration’ 

Professor Loredana Polezzi – University of Cardiff (School of Modern Languages):
‘The portrayal in contemporary literary texts of the relationship between migration, translation and the law”

Afternoon:

Workshop 3 – ‘Translating migration’ in practice

Professor Angela Creese & Professor Adrian Blackledge – University of Birmingham (School of Education):
‘Translation in everyday practice”

Dr Frances Rock – University of Cardiff (School of English, communication and philosophy)
“Just because she’s a solicitor that doesn’t make her any better than you”: Law, translation and migration in confronting disadvantage through enlightened relationships in legal advice”

Dr Elpida Loupaki – Aristotle University of Thessalonika (Department of French studies and literature):
‘Translating migration – beyond terminology’

Piotr Wegorowski – University of Cardiff (School of English, communication and philosophy)
“Translating institutional procedures: the case of community policing”

 

source: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/law/events/2017/law-translation-migration.aspx

Following on from the previous post about upcoming conferences relevant to legal translation, language and law, a few more conferences on the topic have been drawn to my attention by colleagues. Many thanks!

So adding these 2, that makes a total of 7 more conferences on legal translation this year.Continue Reading..

Hard on the heels of the very interesting event “Legal translation to the next level” held on 4 February here in London come a series of other events and conferences all relating to the topic.  The tagline for the London conference was that legal translators should ‘roar to the world’ about their existence.  Another 5 conferences happening this year will certainly help get the message out there about what legal translators do and the important role they play. So here’s a quick round-up of forthcoming legal translation events:Continue Reading..

The role of legal translators, and of legal translation as an activity, is attracting increasing attention, with a host of conferences having been organised on the subject or closely related topics in recent years.

I’ve recently returned from a very interesting and productive conference in Seville entitled, “From Legal Translation to Jurilinguistics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” held at the Universidad Pablo   de Olavide in late October.

The recent conference in Seville emphasised the important role legal translators have to play

The recent conference in Seville emphasised the important role legal translators have to play

Some of the key themes that emerged at the conference for me were:

  • The vital communicative role that legal translators have to play

Prof. Jan Engberg, an expert in knowledge communication, stressed that legal translation is all about the translator being able to communicate specialised knowledge so that people (typically but not always lawyers) in one knowledge community can understand what is being said by people in another knowledge community. Legal translators mediate and broker the transfer of that knowledge and are interested in solving the linguistic problems that emerge in conveying knowledge. Their primary goal should be to create a text in the target situation that can be read in the right way by its audience. He stressed the importance of comparative law in this regard; which brings us to the next major theme at the conference.

  • The importance of comparative law skills for legal translators

Another broad theme at the conference was the importance of comparative law, and the importance of a transystemic approach to the study of law to enable legal translation to occur more easily because of greater understanding on the part of legal translators of what the concepts involved mean in, and across, legal systems; a topic addressed by Prof. Emerich in her keynote address.

  • How important it is for legal translators to correctly position themselves in the market

Building on the vital communicative role legal translators play, Juliette Scott, emphasised in her presentation the importance of legal translators correctly positioning themselves in the market, and stressed how important it is for legal translators to choose the correct terms when referring to themselves, primarily because of the impact this has on how the market perceives them as professionals.

  • The growing importance of corpuses for identifying language patterns and for aiding consistency and improving quality in legal translation

In her keynote speech Prof. L. Biel examined the historical development of corpuses in translation and discussed the importance of corpuses so far as a research tool. Since legal language is highly patterned and formulaic, corpuses are proving useful in identifying these patterns; though some translation studies have indicated that despite such high formulaicity, translators often have a tendency to use their own phrases rather than the patterns that would typically be used in corresponding target language texts. Somehow “translation as a process” is interfering. It is to be hoped that corpuses can be operationalised to ensure greater consistency across languages to improve translation quality. Gianluca Pontrandolfo also presented interesting corpus-based research on judicial phraseology, and several other speakers provided practical examples of how corpuses can promote better quality legal translations.

  • The need for better quality legal dictionaries

On a related point, several speakers analysed the difficulties one often encounters with legal dictionaries and presented projects aimed at creating better quality legal dictionaries or glossaries, presenting some interesting methodologies such as the ‘least bad possible equivalents’ for terms when two legal systems do not have the same concepts (Frison & Gavrilova) or a participative, interactive glossary-development process (Fiola).

  • The role of the EU’s directive on translation and interpreting in criminal settings

Several other papers addressed the progress made so far in adapting the law in various EU countries to the requirements of the recent directive on translation and interpreting in criminal settings, revealing that transposition has not always been a smooth process.

 

 

Translation of legal documents and complicated legal language

On 29 June, I attended an interesting afternoon about the drafting of legislation and some of the difficulties it poses, with some discussion of the translation of legal documents thrown in too and a lot of interesting input from the audience from legal interpreters who often have to deal with the complexities of legal language and explain them to the ordinary man.

6 speakers presented different issues relating to law and language (and raised the topic of legal translation). Brief summaries are set out below that highlight the key issues of interest in the translation of legal documents.

Hayley Rogers, a UK legislative drafter, outlined the UK legislative drafting process and some of the difficulties it presents. She argued that legislative drafters tend to see themselves as ‘architects’ but often the practicalities of the drafting process mean they are actually more akin to ‘cowboy builders’ creating chaotic-looking legislation because of a series of constraints (primarily political and policy-related) imposed on the drafters.  So instead of striving for perfection they often just have to cope with the world ‘as it is’. This may resonate with legal translators who face demands for perfection from clients, but are constrained by real world factors like short delivery deadlines.

Prof. Maria De Benedetto spoke about how the language of the law is often incomprehensible to the layman, how it is a language of the elite, and outlined some of the techniques those who speak the language of the law utilise to maintain their elite status, such as reliance on Latin when ordinary people are unlikely to comprehend it.

James Hadley is new to legal translation as a discipline but comes from a strong background in translation theory. He is currently involved in a project being run by the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) exploring some of these key questions that arise when laws and legal documents need to be translated from one language to another. His presentation looked at equivalence and legal translation and his working hypothesis is that equivalence (defined as “the notion that a translated text produces the same effect for its readers as the source text did for its own” may be demonstrable in legal language.

He posited that those who are capable of doing legal translations properly will need to have a very specific skill set, represented by the following Venn diagram:

The skill set need for the translation of legal documents

The skill set need for the translation of legal documents

 

Nothing original here, but it is always good that key issues in the discipline are presented to new audiences and that more people become educated about legal translation and what it entails, who can do it, and so on.

It will be interesting to hear more about his research as it becomes available.  According to the School of Advanced Studies website, the larger project that Hadley’s research relates to will look at who legal translators should be, how to assess the quality of their work, and what issues reading a legal document may raise from a language / law viewpoint.  Legal translation is taking place all the time, and may entail the translation of laws that have the same effect as the original language version in bi- and multi-lingual jurisdictions. Outside of an institutional context, that sort of legal translation is a rarity. Much more common is the translation of legal documents for other reasons: international commerce, the purchase of land, employees working in other countries needing to know their rights. Legal language is complicated though; often dubbed negatively as ‘legalese’ which is difficult to understand even for native speakers of the source language. To quote the School’s announcement about the upcoming project, “That being the case, and legal traditions around the world being so variable, it is easy to see how translating legal documents from one language to another would be no mean feat. Even if you do happen to speak both languages, you also need to understand, and be able to reproduce the respective forms of legalese with an extremely high degree of technical accuracy.”

William Robinson, Associate Research Fellow at IALS, spoke about the complexities of the EU drafting process, highlighting the important role of translators in the overall process.

Stephen Neale, Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, examined the question of ‘interpreting’ the meaning of words and highlighted the importance of context in coming up with good and bad faith interpretations of what legal words actually mean. He pointed out that judges, often considered to be the final arbiters of what the law ‘means’ often don’t have a strong grasp of linguistics, and gave some examples of ‘weird’ outcomes in cases where the judges appeared to go against the ‘common sense’ meaning of the words. His assertion is that there is a set of heuristics we use all the time to figure out the common sense meaning intended by others and that intrinsically we all know when an ‘interpretation’ is in bad faith.

Jerome Tessuto provided a data-driven analysis of how writing styles and language conventions from one country can influence those of another, by looking at the impact of English arbitration legislation on Singapore’s arbitration legislation.  He pointed out that while deontic modality, and the use of shall in particular, is on the decline in English legislation because of the impact of the Plain Language movement, his data revealed that it was still important in Singaporean legislation, though an audience member who was a legislative drafter from Singapore pointed out that recently that has begun to change.

 

 

“Why is legal language so complicated? Legislative drafters and linguists compare notes”

Dealing with legal language all day long, legal translators are definitely aware that it is complicated stuff. This workshop, to be held in London by the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies on 29.6.2016, takes a look at how the viewpoint of the linguist can be co-opted to help legislative drafters produce better quality texts (and hopefully make legal translation an easier process too).

 

More information: http://www.sas.ac.uk/support-research/public-events/2016/why-legal-language-so-complicated-legislative-drafters-and-lin-1


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