Upgrading the Profile of the Legal Translator in the Eu, Canada and Switzerland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT. Legal translators at the International Court of Justice at The Hague are called 'legal secretaries'; in Canada, specialists in bilingual legislative drafting are called 'legislative counsel' or 'jurilinguists'; in the European Union legal translators are called 'lawyer-linguists' (French: 'juristes-linguistes'). The category of 'authoritative' legal texts (constitutions, statues, codes, treaties, conventions, contracts etc.) are legally binding instruments, in other words texts vested with the force of the law. Consequently, the legal translator is required take on both legal and linguistic decisions. The paper focuses on pointing out the new upgraded linguistic and legal responsibilities that shape the profile of the legal translator in different cultural spaces (Canada, Switzerland, European Union) nowadays.Keywords: 'authoritative' legal texts; bilingual co-drafting; legal competence; jurilinguist; lawyer-linguist1. IntroductionBefore the 20th century the legal translator had a very limited role and acted as a passive mediator between the text producers and receivers. The main translation principle that used govern the legal translators' work was fidelity the source text; despite this principle, serious doubt was cast on their ability express the intended meaning of the source text objectively, without the slightest subjective interpretations or value judgments that might easily have altered the legal effect produced. Michael Akehurst, a member of the team that translated the English version of the Treaty establishing the EEC considers that the legal translator's job is to translate what is actually being said, not what he thinks ought have been said; with regard his own experience of translating the Treaty, he acknowledges that his task was to translate the Treaty, not improve it.(Akehurst, 1972:25-26). On the same line of reasoning, Susan Sarcevic mentioned in her book that of the biggest fears of treatymakers is that translators will clarify an intentional ambiguity or unclarity (Sarcevic, 1997: 92). It goes without saying that Treaties are sometimes the result of many political compromises where consensus needs be obtained even at the cost of sacrificing clarity in formulation. In other words, in the view of the authors mentioned above, legal translators should not overstep their role in the attempt interpret the letter of the law; neither should they clarify things that were intentionally left unclear from the very beginning. Their responsibilities were strictly limited assuming linguistic decisions.Yet, if we are see things from a different perspective, we also have join Deborah Cao in her legitimate question of the translator of international instruments distinguishes the deliberate obscurity that is the expression of a political and often hard-won compromise from inadvertent obscurity produced when those drafting the original text use a language that is not their mother tongue (Cao, 2007:153). In a nutshell, how should a translator of international or European legal instruments distinguish a politically motivated linguistic obscurity, intentionally left unclear in a text, from a negligent linguistic error, caused by the drafters' lack of linguistic competence? We consider that, as long as translators focus both on the legal content of the text and on the consistency of specific terminology and make the best use of their experience as professional translators and jurists, preferably, they may easily discern what particular intervention may be asked of them - either political diplomacy or text proof reading.According the Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for the persons involved in the drafting of legislation within the Community institutions, guideline 5.2, ... the original text must be particularly simple, clear and direct, since any overcomplexity or ambiguity, however slight, could result in inaccuracies, approximations or real mistranslations in one or more of the Community languages. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".