Back in June 2015 I attended the Transius Conference on legal and institutional translation hosted by the University of Geneva.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be summarising some of the main points made by speakers based on notes taken at the conference. The idea is to convey a rough flavour of the main ideas presented at the conference.

Let’s start with a keynote speech given by Professor Jan Engberg entitled: Comparative law and legal translation: Adjusting partners to build the necessary knowledge

Prof. Jan Engberg isn’t a legal translator per se but a professor of knowledge communication.

Knowledge communication investigates intentional decision-based communication of specialised knowledge in professional settings, from one expert to another, as well as from one expert to a non-expert.

His main argument is that to provide a legal translation is to communicate knowledge. He sees legal translation as strategically choosing relevant parts of complex conceptual knowledge represented in the source text in order to present the aspects exactly relevant for the text in the target text situation. What is being conveyed is legal knowledge held by legal experts, communicated, and developed in an ongoing communicative process within expert peer groups.

For Engberg translation is an act of knowledge communication; and knowledge lies at the very core of legal translation. To do a good job as a legal translator one needs to build the necessary knowledge. The act of translating is the act of building knowledge. Translation is always context-bound and the central challenge in legal translation is how to translate concepts in the text, how to write a target text that is an accurate rendering of the source text that is accessible to readers. Accessibility is the key issue here.

In the talk, Prof. Engberg explored certain tools for achieving this. Essentially he argues that the translator must strike a balance between four interests, which is to say he/she must:

– Understand the aspects of the source legal text that are present in the document

– Anticipate the receiver’s knowledge base

– Reflect the linguistic and textual structures of the source text

– Create a linguistically acceptable form in the target text.

The goal is to strike a balance that secures a situationally relevant equilibrium. Comparative law is an important source for making the necessary choices.

He also argued that it was necessary for legal translators to have a way of knowing how they have met that goal, of deciding how knowledge has been properly communicated. Interesting questions he raised are how long the legal translator should keep searching for terms and how the translator can decide when to stop looking. Engberg asserts that paraphrasing is an acceptable coping method if the translator doesn’t have time to find the exact term. This ties into his ideas on the functional approach to translation which is aimed at solving pragmatic formulation problems. Legal Translation requires one to combine knowledge of linguistics (the form of the text), translation studies (the method used in translation), and knowledge of comparative law (which enables one to cope with the legal content). In providing a functional translation, legal translators have to decide what is central, and determine its relevance so the reader can create the intended cognitive structure. Choice is central; assessing relevance is central.