Multilingual Legal Drafting, Translators’ Choices and the Principle of Lesser Evil

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.

The Language(s) of Politics

“…Lawyer-linguists nowadays even have the opportunity to revise the language of the base text, as long as no substantive changes are made (Šarčević 2013). Indeed, Stefaniak (2013) explains that the stages of drafting, translation, and legal revision increasingly overlap today, when they used to be sequential in the past. The result is that, for example, in the Commission, it is not uncommon for the translators to be working on the translation, the lawyers on the legal substance, the editing service on the quality of the source text, and the DG requesting translation on the final version of the text.…”

Legal Translation Versus Legal Interpretation. A Legal-Theoretical Perspective

“…The end product of a translator's work is usually the starting point for an interpretive enquiry. Thus, it is obvious that a translator's choices may directly affect the outcome of legal interpretation [see examples in 1: [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. For instance, "by favouring a certain type of equivalent, the translator effectively sends a signal to the courts as to how that term should be interpreted" [46: 7].…”