Comparative law and the new frontiers of legal translation

The paper aims at investigating the links between comparative law and legal translation. Comparative lawyers are genetically predestined to deal with legal translation issues. The information they seek about foreign legal systems is embedded in the language that the legal system under analysis uses to express its legal rules. That is why legal translation has always been considered an important tool for comparative law analysis. Traditionally, problems of legal translation arise from the need to transpose concepts from one language into another in the course of comparative law analysis, with the aim of gaining knowledge, seeking divergences and convergences, unveiling traps and concrete difficulties in finding divergences and convergences in legal concepts. In comparative law, every operation of legal translation implies a complex intellectual work that should be aimed at understanding the ‘deep’ meaning of what we want to translate and at identifying a possible correspondence in the target language. It is far from being a mere technical issue because law and language are profoundly culture bound. That is why translating always implies an interpretation issue, while the mere juxtaposition of legal concepts in the different languages should be avoided, as it could only reach a very superficial result. From this perspective, legal translation needs to guard against the opposite dangers of unfaithfulness to the source culture and unintelligibility of the target text. Something will certainly get lost, but comparative lawyers may also find something in this translation process. Nowadays the new frontiers of legal translation in the comparative law field are strongly connected with the problems of drafting EU legislation in a multilingual environment and the need to create a common teminology