New resources for legal translators

Abstract

One of the major problems in legal translation is the command one must have of the source and target legal systems. As opposed to specialised translation in other areas, legal translation does not begin from a single unique conceptual system common to different languages which employ their own terms. Each legal system is unique and different. In this article we propose using ontologies in the field of legal translation as a system for organising notions in different legal systems into categories which allow for a comparative understanding. This is illustrated with an example of a company contract and its corresponding clauses.

Keywords:

• legal translation
• legal translation teaching
• ontology
• terminology management
• knowledge acquisition

Notes

1. See, for instance, Alcaraz (2000; 2004), Bestué (2008), Bocquet (1996), Borja (2000; 2005a; b), Cao (2007), Dullion, (2000; 2007), Ferrán (2004, 2005) Gémar (1988; 2005; 2006), Godayol (2006), Gotti and Sarcevic (2006), Hickey (2004, 2005a, b), Ioratti ( 2007), Lérat (1995), Mayoral (2000, 2003), Mayoral (2006, 2007a, b), Monzó (2003), Pommer (2008a, b), Sandrini (1996, 2006), Terral (2002), Santamaria (2003, 2006) and Sarcevic (1997, 2000).

2. It should be noted that a high degree of intertextuality is inherent to legal texts Whilst this is also true of other fields, legal texts are unique in that intertextuality is usually tacit and determining. For example, a common feature of legal texts is that no reference is made to the statute law or jurisprudence relevant to a particular text, it being assumed that target text readers possess this knowledge

3. The names of the translation techniques have been adapted from Santamaria (2003).

4. An appeal court in England and Wales for civil and criminal cases, but which is not the highest court of appeal. The highest courts of appeal in England are the Court of Appeal or the House of Lords (although its role as such is currently under revision).

5. The Supreme Court of Judicature encompasses all the higher jurisdictional courts for England and Wales (Court of Appeal, High Court and Crown Court) and is thus not a specific court to which it is possible to appeal.

6. The highest court of appeal in Spain (outside the jurisdiction of the Tribunal Constitucional), for cases pertaining to civil, criminal, administrative and military law.

7. This is inevitable. Confusion between the different concepts of each legal system is at times such that legal translators are unable to identify the system to which a given concept belongs.

8. Another major resource that will soon be available is the result of research work currently being undertaken by A. Borja and E. Monzó at the Jaume I University, as part of the GENTT project (see García Izquierdo & Monzó, 2003, 2005; Borja & Monzó, 2000). This project is geared towards producing an encyclopaedia of legal textual genres covering Spanish, British and US law, and will undoubtedly prove to be extremely useful for legal translators.

9. Borja (2005) refers to such tools as ‘legal IT’ and organises them into three categories: (i) documentary and managerial legal IT, i.e. programs for the automatic drafting of legal texts; (ii) legal IT for data and document recovery (databases such as the LEXIS, WESTLAW, SCALE or INFO1); and (iii) rule-based expert systems that use logical inference techniques to create models of legal reasoning for automatic decision-making, in an attempt to formalise law and legal reasoning.

10. See Gruber (1993) for an in-depth definition.

11. Breuker is the co-creator of OCL.NL, an ontology focusing on the area of Dutch criminal law (as part of the European IST project known as ‘e-Court’, which was geared to the development of a tool that would allow for the semi-automatic management of procedural documents, such as transcripts of oral hearings), and has taken part in projects such as TRACS (see Den Haan, 1996; Den Haan & Breuker, 1996), ON-LINE (see Valente et al., 1999) and FOLaw (see Valente, 1995).

12. That is, whether it is an informative translation, a text to be adapted to the target legal system, a translation to be used as the basis upon which another document will be drafted.

13. Zaibert and Smith (2005), Smith (2001, 2004) and Kralingen (1997), focus on the more philosophical aspects of ontologies. While such reflections may be extremely helpful for computer scientists (who actually create these ontologies) or legal experts (who attempt to design practical ontologies that will solve problems of a legal nature), they do not provide information that is useful for translators.

14. Regardless of the will to enter into agreements, in some cases there are provisions that must necessarily be placed on record if a contract is to be valid. For example, it is necessary for this provision to feature in English sales contracts. In Spain, lease contracts are a type of contract for which the minimum clauses are stipulated by law.

15. Protégé 3.0, http://protege.stanford.edu, © 1998–2006, Stanford University.

16. Slots are the fields envisaged for describing a concept in a category. They may be open fields in which it is possible to include any relevant piece of data, or fields that associate an element or an instance with another from the ontology.

17. Some slots that encompass a relationship between one instance and another are also able to anticipate the inverse slot on the basis of the description of the instance, in such a way that the editor automatically reproduces that information. For example, with the hypernym slot, it could be said that instance A is the hypernym of B (A>B). With the inverse slot hyponym, the editor would automatically create the relationship B is the hyponym of A (B<A).

18. From a conceptual point of view, it might have been more appropriate to work on the basis of the existence of a sole notion or underlying concept, and, therefore, of a single entry with one name in each language. However, given the structure of the editor and the application of this ontology, we felt it more useful to make distinctions from a linguistic point of view and to relate the notion in English with the English clauses and ULMs, and likewise with the Spanish notion. The notions are thus interrelated through the equivalent field, but each name is only related with information in the same language and, therefore, from the same legal system.