Mind the Gap! Translation of Foreign Law Is Not What You Think

Abstract

While much legal research involves foreign law and much of foreign law exists in a foreign language, the issue of translation has attracted limited theoretical attention only. In particular, few lawyers are aware of the work issuing from fields like literary criticism, philosophy, or translation studies. Urging acknowledgment and redress of such a serious epistemic deficit, basing itself on a critical approach to foreignness, this article offers a constructive guide to the making of just translations. A noteworthy feature of the argument concerns the formulation of conclusions that can fairly be expected to run counter-intuitively to a lawyer’s unexamined assumptions. Indeed, much of what is received as conventional wisdom about the translation of foreign law is either ill-considered or plain wrong.

Keywords

• comparative law
• foreign law
• critical theory
• translation
• interpretation