Comment by TazeTSchnitzel
13 years ago
The closest thing to a universal expression of law is probably English. In older times, it would have been... Latin?
13 years ago
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.