Creating Multilingual Legal Texts

This chapter assesses the challenges in producing multilingual legal texts, especially where these texts are supposed to be equally authentic. The first of these challenges is translation. The risk is that a failure to achieve translation equivalence compromises legal certainty. Equivalence aside, there are also deeper political tensions in the process of legal translation: power struggles among speakers of the source and target language may be reflected in translation strategies adopted. Apart from translating the law, the legislature also needs to revise drafting procedures to ensure that different language versions of the law are consistent with one another, and that they respect linguistic equality where it is emphasized by the law. Where the new official language has not developed a legal vocabulary and a formal register, further linguistic engineering may be necessary. Sometimes ideological engineering is also called for.