Workshop for Legal Language Professionals – De la traduction des lois à la corédaction, l'avènement d'une jurilinguistique canadienne

In this series of workshops, the Graduate Diploma in Legal Translation at McGill University invites you to discover different dimensions of professions at the crossroad of law and languages. We offer both introductory workshops to key professions, such as legal translation and court interpreting, as well as workshops on highly specialized issues that will better meet the needs of experienced jurilinguists.

Legal translation stands apart from all other forms of translation in one key respect: it is governed by the binding force of the law itself. In translating legal texts such as acts, regulations, judgments and contracts, translators must also contend with the specific challenges inherent to these documents. The first of these challenges arises from the law and legal system itself. Between English and French, and vice versa, we enter the realm of comparative law, in which two very different systems coexist. By nature, the legal translator is a comparatist, obliged to render the law faithfully within the framework of its own rules. The second challenge lies in the readability and clarity of the target text. And the third and final challenge resides in the form of the target text, which varies between systems depending on the culture in question. This is especially true of the common law–civil law pair, with each system expressing, sui generis, its culture and its rules through writing. This mode of expression—whether verbose or concise—immediately signals to readers the distinctive nature of each legal culture. These observations apply to the three main types of legal texts—acts, judgments, and contracts—each of which has its own distinctive features. Our analysis focuses primarily on the act, the “window on the law,” and on the translation process leading to the emergence of a Canadian legal language, as revealed through the co-drafting of legislation.

This initiative is supported by Justice Canada's Access to Justice in Both Official Languages Support Fund.