Alongside leading Jurtrans’s specialist Greek-to-English legal and financial translation practice, John O’Shea (LL.B., LL.M.) conducts peer-reviewed empirical and doctrinal research on intersystemic legal translation, comparative law, and the performance and risks of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Generative AI in Greek and English legal contexts. He has co-translated the Greek Code of Civil Procedure, the Greek Penal Code and Greek Code of Criminal Procedure, as well as the Greek Code of Private Maritime Law into English (published by Lex Graeca) and is currently Visiting Researcher at the University of Surrey Centre for Translation Studies. Below is a selection of his published book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and major code translations.
Authors: Vilelmini Sosoni and John O’Shea
Publication: International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication (ed. Anne Wagner), Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Date: 2026 | book-chapter
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This empirical study evaluates a custom-built, domain-adapted Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine trained on 1.19 million Greek-to-English legal sentence pairs against three Generative AI models (ChatGPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Flash, and Claude 3 Haiku) across Greek property law texts: an official planning law document (Nomos 4759/2020) and a Greek notarial property purchase agreement. Using the harmonised DQF-MQM error typology assessed by two lawyer-linguists, the study demonstrates that Accuracy errors predominate across all systems (ranging from 51.11% to 60.38% of total errors in the planning law text and 26.67% to 53.85% in the property agreement). Major errors capable of misleading the reader and creating legal risk accounted for 73.58% of ChatGPT-4o’s errors and 64.44% of Gemini 1.5 Flash’s errors on the statutory text. Critical and major failures included mistranslating κατάσχεση (seizure/attachment of assets) as “confiscation”, confusing κατοχή (physical possession/detention) with κυριότητα (ownership), and inverting legal polarity (“not subject to” rendered as “subject to”). Because Generative AI produces fluent English prose that masks severe doctrinal and terminological errors, the authors conclude that post-editing machine outputs poses acute risks of undetected legal liability in cross-border property transactions.
Authors: Argyri Panezi and John O’Shea
Publication: International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication (ed. Anne Wagner), Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Date: 2026 | book-chapter
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This chapter introduces an ecological framework of “language pollution” to analyse how Large Language Models (LLMs) affect the integrity of legal language across five interconnected dimensions: fabricated legal content (“hallucinations”), language and jurisdiction bias, technology-mediated legal transplants, engineered legal reasoning (“ambiguity collapse”), and an emerging do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality in law. Drawing on over 1,000 documented court cases worldwide involving AI-fabricated authorities (including UK King’s Bench warnings in Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 and Nippon Life v OpenAI, filed March 2026), the chapter demonstrates how probabilistic token prediction imitates the surface syntax of legal discourse while obscuring jurisdictional boundaries. It features an empirical Greek law case study (O’Shea 2025) in which ChatGPT, queried in English regarding an Athens boundary fence dispute, generated confident but fabricated translations and interpretations of Greek Civil Code Articles 1003–1010 (provisions that actually govern emissions, falling fruit, and encroaching buildings rather than fences), illustrating the epistemic vulnerability faced by cross-border litigants and legal practitioners relying on unverified AI outputs.
Authors: John O’Shea and Daniel Webber
Publication: Language for Legislation and Legislation through Language (eds. Tímea Drinóczi, Giulia A. Pennisi, and Helen Xanthaki), Routledge, pp. 263–291
Date: 2026 | book-chapter
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Building on Helen Xanthaki’s legislative drafting principles of clarity, precision, and unambiguity, this chapter uses the Lex Graeca project, which translated Greece’s four foundational legal codes (the Civil Code, Penal Code, Code of Civil Procedure, and Code of Criminal Procedure) into English, as a diagnostic tool to evaluate the effectiveness of Greek statutory drafting. Because a legal translator must scrutinise every syntactic and conceptual relationship in a statute to render it into another legal language, the translation process exposes latent drafting defects in the original text. Through detailed examples drawn from the translated Greek codes, the authors demonstrate how unclear phrasing, terminological inconsistency, and semantic ambiguity in Greek legislative provisions hinder accurate cross-border legal communication, and they set out the comparative strategies developed by the translation team alongside recommendations for reforming legislative drafting in Greece.
Authors: Argyri Panezi and John O’Shea
Publication: SSRN Electronic Journal (Research Paper / Preprint)
Date: 2025-12-01 | preprint
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This research paper examines the immediate and long-term systemic costs of replacing human legal translation specialists with automated neural machine translation and generative AI tools across judicial and transactional settings. The authors analyse five overlooked threat vectors arising from the marginalisation of human lawyer-linguists: reduced terminological and doctrinal reliability, breaches of client privacy and legal professional privilege when confidential documents are processed through third-party servers, copyright infringements, entrenched algorithmic and jurisdictional bias, and emerging barriers to access to justice. The study demonstrates why comparative legal reasoning and human accountability remain indispensable for safeguarding the integrity of cross-border legal practice.
Authors: Kyriaki Kourouni and John O’Shea
Publication: Revista Tradumàtica: Tecnologies de la Traducció, Volume 23, pp. 266–285
Date: 2025-12-15 | journal-article
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While academic literature has examined the competences of professional legal translators, the actual use of digital translation tools by practising lawyers in Greece had remained largely unexplored. Growing out of discussions surrounding the 2024 European Commission Translating Europe Workshop: The Human Factor in Legal Translation at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, this empirical study investigates how Greek lawyers adopt and integrate machine translation into their legal workflows. Drawing on survey data from legal practitioners across Greece, the paper analyses which digital translation tools lawyers select, their practical motivations for using automated systems, the factors governing when they rely on raw machine output versus commissioning a human specialist, and their level of awareness regarding confidentiality breaches, data protection obligations, and legal liability risks.
Translators / Co-Authors: Translated by John O’Shea and Daniel Webber
Publication: Lex Graeca Limited (Volume 3 of The Greek Quadricodex Series, 400 pp.)
Date: 2025-06-30 | book
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Published as the third volume in The Greek Quadricodex Series, this book provides a complete, side-by-side bilingual English translation of the Greek Penal Code (Law 4619/2019), incorporating all legislative amendments and updates up to and including March 2025. Designed for international criminal defence practitioners, judicial authorities, corporate legal departments, and comparative law scholars, the volume includes an academic introduction by Thomas Samios (Lecturer at the Division of Criminal Law and Criminology, Democritus University of Thrace) alongside a detailed foreword by the translators setting out their comparative methodology and how complex statutory definitions—such as Article 13 of the Code—were resolved against Greek Supreme Court case law. The text is accompanied by comprehensive Greek-to-English and English-to-Greek legal terminology glossaries.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: 11th European Society for Translation Studies (EST) Congress: The Changing Faces of Translation and Interpreting Studies (University of Leeds), Congress Book of Abstracts, p. 564
Date: 2025-06 | conference-paper
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Presented at the 11th European Society for Translation Studies (EST) Congress at the University of Leeds, this paper examines the growing willingness of professional translators to challenge long-standing working conditions, opaque supply-chain arrangements, and commercial industry practices. Against the backdrop of rapid generative AI adoption, downward pressure on rates, and the push towards machine translation post-editing (MTPE), the study explores how specialist translators are finding a collective and individual voice to assert professional agency, advocate for fair remuneration, and articulate the irreplaceable value of human domain expertise.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: Legal Translation & Interpreting on the Move: Research and Professional Opportunities (Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies — IUSLIT, University of Trieste), Conference Book of Abstracts, p. 113
Date: 2024-10-04 | conference-paper
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Presented at the University of Trieste, this paper frames the discussion around the real-world impacts of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Generative AI, and other machine-based approaches to legal translation through a series of urgent empirical questions for the profession. It examines how extensively automated technologies are actually being used by lawyers and direct clients, why reliance on machine outputs is growing despite well-documented limitations in handling system-bound legal terminology and ambiguity, and how this shift affects ethical obligations, professional credibility, and the reliability of legal services. The paper concludes by setting out a research agenda calling for reception studies and empirical surveys of practising lawyers, clients, and professional legal translators rather than student cohorts.
Authors: Łucja Biel, Juliette Scott, and John O’Shea
Publication: Handbook of the Language Industry: Contexts, Performances and Profiles (eds. Gary Massey, Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, and Erik Angelone), De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 321–348
Date: 2024 | book-chapter
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This chapter examines the roles, qualifications, and professional realities of legal translators, distinguishing between institutional practitioners (such as lawyer-linguists at the Court of Justice of the European Union) and outstitutional practitioners operating in private legal and corporate markets. It analyses the core competences and qualification requirements established under ISO 20771:2020 (Legal translation — Requirements) compared with general translation standards, highlighting the system-bound nature of legal terminology and the comparative law analysis required to bridge incongruous civil and common law jurisdictions. The authors evaluate the risks of market commoditisation, unregulated procurement, and the growing pressure to adopt machine translation post-editing (MTPE) in high-stakes legal workflows, demonstrating why fluent neural machine translation output requires specialist legal and linguistic expertise rather than industrial manufacturing processes.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: EULITA & PEEMPIP Conference: Training the Modern Legal Interpreter and Translator (Acropolis Museum, Athens)
Date: 2024-04-20 | conference-paper
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Delivered at the joint conference of the European Legal Interpreters and Translators Association (EULITA) and the Panhellenic Association of Professional Translators Graduates of the Ionian University (PEEMPIP) in Athens, this presentation examines who bears legal liability when defective legal translations cause financial or judicial harm. Drawing on empirical surveys of freelance legal translators and language service providers (LSPs), the paper analyses structural market dysfunctions—including the delegation of urgent legal translations in Greece to unpaid trainee lawyers or non-specialist intermediaries—and evaluates how contractual disclaimers, professional indemnity insurance, and the growing integration of AI revision workflows complicate accountability across the legal translation supply chain.
Translators / Co-Authors: Translated by Daniel Webber and John O’Shea
Publication: Lex Graeca Limited (Volume 2 of The Greek Quadricodex Series, 546 pp.)
Date: 2024-03-01 | book
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Representing the first complete English translation of the Greek Code of Civil Procedure (Presidential Decree 503/1985, together with the Law Introducing the Code of Civil Procedure), this 546-page bilingual edition incorporates all legislative amendments through February 2023. Prepared over several years as Volume 2 of The Greek Quadricodex Series, the work clarifies the entire procedural framework governing Greek civil courts—from jurisdiction, service of pleadings, and evidentiary rules to interim remedies, appellate review, and enforcement—for international litigation counsel, corporate legal departments, investors, and legal translators. The volume features an academic introduction by Dr Panayiotis Yiannopoulos, an extensive methodological foreword by the translators, and bidirectional Greek-English and English-Greek terminology glossaries.
Authors: Daniel Webber and John O’Shea
Publication: Hellenic Language and Terminology: Proceedings of the 14th Conference, Hellenic Society for Terminology (ELETO), pp. 230–241
Date: 2023-11 | conference-paper
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While translations of the Greek Civil and Penal Codes had been attempted in the past, Greece’s three procedural codes (the Code of Criminal Procedure, Code of Civil Procedure, and Code of Administrative Procedure) had never previously been translated into English, and existing Greek-English legal dictionaries failed to cover procedural terminology accurately. Presented at the 14th Conference of the Hellenic Society for Terminology (ELETO), this paper examines how the Lex Graeca project systematically mapped the terminology of the Greek procedural codes for the first time. The authors demonstrate that each code constitutes a self-contained interpretive system nested within the wider Greek legal order, requiring translators to resolve terminological overlaps, cross-references, and conceptual asymmetries between continental procedural rules and common-law English terminology.
Authors: Juliette Scott and John O’Shea
Publication: Research Handbook on Jurilinguistics (eds. Anne Wagner and Aleksandra Matulewska), Edward Elgar Publishing
Date: 2023-10-13 | book-chapter
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Drawing on a ten-year thematic analysis of more than 600 court cases, institutional reports, and stakeholder surveys across civil and common law jurisdictions, this chapter introduces a Legal Translation Vulnerability Scoping Diagram (VSD) to assess how legal systems are exposed when written translation occurs outside institutional control. The framework maps three dimensions: systemic exposure across courts, law firms, corporations, and state authorities; operational stressors such as non-diligent procurement, unqualified translators, and the illusion of fluidity in raw machine translation; and adaptive capacity. Three case studies demonstrate the model in practice: failed cross-border tax enforcement between UK and Italian authorities (Essential Telecom Ltd v Revenue and Customs), translation errors in a supranational machine translation portal tested on the French Court of Cassation Uber ruling, and identity fraud risks in translated breeder documents for Greek citizenship applications.
Translator / Co-Author: Translated by John O’Shea and Daniel Webber
Publication: Lex Graeca Limited
Date: 2023-08-15 | book
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This volume provides an authoritative English translation of Greece’s newly enacted Code of Private Maritime Law (Law 5020/2023), which comprehensively overhauled Greek shipping legislation for the first time since 1958. Prepared specifically for maritime lawyers, P&I clubs, shipowners, and international courts dealing with Greek-flagged vessels and shipping disputes, the translation renders complex Greek civil-law maritime concepts into precise common-law English terminology. It covers ship registration, maritime liens and mortgages, ship management agreements, carriage of goods and passengers, charterparties, collision liability, salvage, and marine arrest proceedings.
Authors: Argyri Panezi and John O’Shea
Publication: Workshop on Generative AI and Law / International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
Date: 2023-07 | conference-paper
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Presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Generative AI and Law, this paper examines the professional, ethical, and legal liability frameworks governing the use of neural machine translation (NMT) and large language models in legal practice. The authors analyse three core risk areas: confidentiality and data protection breaches when sensitive legal documents are uploaded to cloud-based AI tools, contractual and tortious liability arising from AI hallucinations and terminological inaccuracies, and lawyers’ duties of technological competence and supervision under bar association rules. The study concludes that because generative AI lacks comparative legal reasoning and system-bound domain awareness, unverified machine output poses acute risks in cross-border litigation and transactional law, requiring human lawyer-linguists in the loop.
Authors: Juliette Scott and John O’Shea
Publication: Professional Discourse across Medicine, Law, and Other Disciplines: Issues and Perspectives (eds. Girolamo Tessuto, Richard Ashcroft, and Vijay K. Bhatia), Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Date: 2023 | book-chapter
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Investigating the interdiscursive interface where medicine and the law meet across language barriers, this chapter examines the legal, financial, and health repercussions of non-diligent written translation in medico-legal contexts. Applying a micro, meso, and macro analytical framework to twelve international case studies, the authors examine criminal investigations into clinical trial fatalities in France involving defective translated Investigator Brochures, patient deaths and injuries resulting from hospital-staff translations of radiotherapy manuals and orthopaedic prosthesis labels, High Court personal injury disputes over translated Spanish disability tariffs (Scales v Motor Insurers’ Bureau), and the irreversible invalidation of pharmaceutical patents (IBSA Institut Biochimique v Teva Pharmaceuticals USA). The study demonstrates that serious harm and corporate liability regularly originate upstream at the translation procurement stage when medical and legal stakeholders rely on lay staff or unverified machine translation.
Translator / Co-Author: Translated by Daniel Webber and John O’Shea
Publication: Lex Graeca Limited
Date: 2022-09-30 | book
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This book presents a complete English translation of the Greek Code of Criminal Procedure (Law 4620/2019, as amended), providing international defence counsel, prosecutors, judicial authorities, and comparative legal scholars with direct access to Greek criminal procedural law.
Authors: Juliette Scott and John O’Shea
Publication: Comparative Legilinguistics
Date: 2022-07-05 | journal-article
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Drawing on a cross-jurisdictional dataset of 150 defamation cases from the United Kingdom, the United States, and continental Europe, this article analyses how foreign-language translations operate as the source of libel, a defence against defamation claims, or a gateway to cross-border litigation. Through a diachronic examination of ten landmark cases—including Dunn v Gannett, Sobrinho v Impresa Publishing, Soriano v Le Point, Ahuja v Politika, and Irving v Penguin Books—the authors examine how courts handle competing translations, judicial reliance on general dictionaries or Google Translate, the admissibility of lay witness versus expert linguist testimony, and the legal implications of automated website translation widgets for defamation republication and forum shopping.
Authors: Annette Schiller and John O’Shea
Publication: Translating Crises (eds. Sharon O’Brien and Federico M. Federici), Bloomsbury Academic
Date: 2022 | book-chapter
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This chapter examines the structural role of professional translator and interpreter associations during cascading global, humanitarian, and public health crises. It analyses how professional bodies interface with state authorities, non-governmental organisations, and judicial institutions when emergency multilingual communication is required under severe time and resource constraints. The authors address the tension between rapid crisis response and the maintenance of professional standards, ethical obligations, and remuneration, proposing collaborative frameworks through which professional associations can support emergency preparedness and safeguard the rights of vulnerable linguistic minorities.
Authors: Vilelmini Sosoni, John O’Shea, and Maria Stasimioti
Publication: Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law
Date: 2022 | journal-article
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This empirical study compares the quality of from-scratch human translation against machine translation post-editing (MTPE) when rendering Greek legal texts into English. Professional translators translated real Greek legal extracts both directly and by post-editing neural machine translation output, with the resulting target texts evaluated using the harmonised DQF-MQM error typology. The findings reveal that post-edited translations contained significantly higher numbers of accuracy, terminological, and stylistic errors than human translations produced from scratch. The authors demonstrate that neural machine translation creates an illusion of fluency that primes post-editors to overlook critical system-bound legal errors, confirming that MTPE introduces severe quality and liability risks in Greek-to-English legal translation.
Authors: Vilelmini Sosoni and John O’Shea
Publication: Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, Volume 29, Issue 2, pp. 184–198
Date: 2021 (published online 2020-07-29) | journal-article
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Property law is deeply embedded in national legal history, creating structural incongruities between the Greek civil law division of movable and immovable property and the English common law concepts of real and personal property. Addressing the growing demand for translations of Greek conveyancing instruments within the European Union, this study investigates how system-bound Greek property law terms are transferred into British English. Using a corpus-driven methodology based on a parallel corpus of 20 authentic Greek notarial deeds for the sale of land and buildings and their professional English translations, the authors apply Susan Šarčević’s classification of legal equivalence and translation strategies to evaluate how practising legal translators resolve conceptual asymmetries in cross-border real estate transactions.
Authors: Juliette Scott and John O’Shea
Publication: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique
Date: 2021-11-26 | journal-article
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While legal translation scholarship has traditionally focused on institutional settings such as the European Union or the United Nations, the vast majority of commercial and judicial translation takes place outside institutions. This foundational article investigates how “outstitutional” translated legal documents are challenged, contested, or discredited during their post-delivery lifecycle across four legal orders: Greece, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Analysing case law across criminal enforcement, civil litigation, intellectual property, public procurement tenders, and Greek real estate investment, the authors trace how translation errors, untranslated evidence, competing adversarial translations, and unverified machine translation result in invalidated patents, lost multi-million-euro public tenders, planning fines, and miscarriages of justice.
Translator / Co-Author: Translated by Daniel Webber and John O’Shea
Publication: Lex Graeca Limited
Date: 2021-04-06 | book
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This volume provides an authoritative English translation of Greece’s core corporate governance legislation and regulatory decisions. Designed for international law firms, institutional investors, corporate boards, and M&A practitioners operating in or dealing with Greece.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: ELIA Together 2021 (European Language Industry Association)
Date: 2021-02 | conference-paper
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Building on the client-side risk research presented at ELIA Together 2020, this paper investigates the contractual and tortious liability of Language Service Providers (LSPs) when supplying defective legal translations. Drawing on survey research into industry procurement practices and standard commercial terms of business, the presentation examines how limitation-of-liability clauses operate between end-user law firms, translation agencies, and subcontracted freelance translators, and evaluates the extent to which intermediaries are insulated from—or exposed to—professional negligence claims in high-stakes legal matters.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: Elia Together 2020
Date: 2020-02-27 | conference-paper
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Presented at the European Language Industry Association (ELIA) Together 2020 conference in Milan.
Authors: John O’Shea and Stefaan Bogaerts
Publication: BDÜ Conference: TRANSLATING AND INTERPRETING 4.0. New ways in the digital age
Date: 2019-11 | conference-paper
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Presented at the Federal Association of Interpreters and Translators (BDÜ) conference in Bonn, this paper outlines the development of harmonised European data protection guidelines for translation and interpreting professionals under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679). The authors examine the specific compliance challenges faced by freelance legal translators and language service providers handling personal and confidential data across supply chains, including data controller versus data processor roles, retention of translation memories, and the data security risks posed by cloud-based machine translation tools.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: Jurilinguistics II (Seville, Spain)
Date: 2018-10 | conference-paper
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Presented at the Jurilinguistics II conference at Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, this paper shifts the evaluation of legal translation quality from purely linguistic metrics to a client-side legal risk perspective. Drawing on a survey of international property investors and commercial clients in Greece whose transactions were disrupted by defective translations—including the confusion of Greek vertical ownership (κάθετη ιδιοκτησία) and horizontal ownership (οριζόντια ιδιοκτησία) in notarial deeds—the study demonstrates how a small number of critical terminological errors in a 23,000-word text can trigger tens of thousands of euros in planning fines and lost investment permits.
Authors: John O’Shea
Publication: 13th Conference on Legal Translation, Court Interpreting and Comparative Legilinguistics
Date: 2018-07 | conference-paper
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Presented in Poznań, Poland, this paper explores structured collaboration between academic translation scholars and practising lawyer-linguists.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: Words to Deeds 2: The Value of Legal Translation Professionals
Date: 2018-02 | conference-paper
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Presented at the Words to Deeds 2 Conference in London, this paper examines the consultative role of the specialist legal translator in cross-border investment and litigation. Moving beyond the hands-off agency model, it demonstrates how direct briefing and ongoing dialogue between lawyer-linguists and instructing legal counsel build shared comparative legal knowledge, uncover ambiguities in source documentation early, and safeguard international commercial transactions.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: European Environment
Date: 1995-03 | journal-article
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Published in European Environment (Wiley), this legal and policy article evaluates the European Commission’s interim review of the Fifth Environmental Action Programme (Towards Sustainability). It analyses the legal mechanisms, regulatory enforcement gaps, and institutional challenges involved in integrating environmental protection requirements across European Community sectoral policies.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: The Irish Journal of Tax Law
Date: 1995 | journal-article
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This article analyses the European Community’s proposed directive for a combined carbon dioxide and energy tax aimed at meeting international climate commitments. It examines the fiscal and legal architecture of the measure under European Community treaty provisions, addressing member state sovereignty over taxation, industrial competitiveness exemptions, and the interaction between environmental regulation and internal market harmonisation.
Author: John O’Shea
Publication: Interdisciplinary Strands – The Journal of the Interdisciplinary Network on Environment and Society
Date: 1995 | journal-article
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This article examines the legal and institutional shift from reactive pollution control to sustainable development under the European Union’s Fifth Environmental Action Programme (Towards Sustainability). It explores how legal instruments, fiscal measures, and shared responsibility among public authorities, public and private enterprises, and citizens interact to enforce environmental standards across European jurisdictions.

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