OPENING QUESTION:

Can everything be translated into the languages of law around the world, or are there some things that are just not translatable?

DAVID BELLOS [DB]:

The answer to this question is obviously: no, and yes. From one point of view legal language is the very model of the untranslatable. On the other hand, legal language gets translated all the time, because it has to be. How do you keep out of jail if someone pulls you off the road when you're in a foreign country? Obviously not by learning the language in double quick time, but through translation. How is international business possible? Only because legal contracts get translated. If you do end up in court when abroad, you're likely to find that you have a right to be represented in a language that you do understand, especially if you are the defendant in a criminal trial. Here, in New York for example, the court system employs a large staff of interpreters and translators who service 140 different languages so as to give all defendants the same right to be heard and to understand irrespective of the language they speak. Translation of the law happens, it happens all over the place, it happens all the time.

Despite all this real-world evidence to the contrary, the law is in essence not transferable from one language to another. Law is always located within an institutional, social, and cultural framework that uses words in a special way. Words of ordinary language acquire specific meanings when they are used as legal terms, and some of the terms of law don't mean anything at all outside their specific legal frame.