Comment by Zenst
13 years ago
Sorry semi-OT humour but this is one of the very few times were you can actualy fork with the law and come out ontop :).
Sadly though alot of laws due to changes and word-smith pervertions can be hard to understand and in that it would be nice if there was some universal way to express law's that you could get any law in any country and express. That would be immpressive though hard to do. Only comparision would be picture based traffic signs, that is somewhat as close to universal with regards to laws as can get.
Be nice when all the countries have there laws up in such a way. Will make grepping alot more fun and probrbaly be the birth of lgrep (law-grep).
The closest thing to a universal expression of law is probably English. In older times, it would have been... Latin?
The problem with translating law is that a lot of the time words are used as "terms of art" that have a special meaning based on tradition or, worse, precedent: some court at some point was forced to decide on the meaning of some very fuzzy word, they came down one way, and now the very fuzzy word has a very precise meaning and lawyers like to use it precisely because it has a precise meaning!
That sort of stuff easily gets lost in translation, which is why legal translation is such a pain to do. And probably a good part of why it took the English courts so long to switch from Law French (an old dialect of Norman French long used for English legal writing) to English.