Multilingual Legal Drafting, Translators’ Choices and the Principle of Lesser Evil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Usually the quality of EU translations is not a prominent topic in the public sphere, and when it is brought up as an issue, it is mostly criticized in the context of its allegedly high costs and the apparently low quality. The critics, however, are often unaware of the motives behind the particular translation choices, which they perceive as awkward, unusual or simply wrong. This article argues that these choices result from the particular position of translation in respect to the process of legal drafting in the EU and that of translators in respect to the draftspersons, which results not only in intellectual, but also in ethical dilemmas of the translators. It is further argued that what may be considered an error from an outsider’s point of view is actually a conscious choice made by a translator trying to reconcile various divergent interests.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.072 | 0.121 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".