Legal Integration and Language Diversity
How is the European Union (EU) to create laws that are uniform in a multitude of languages? Specifically, how is it to attain both legal integration and language diversity simultaneously without the latter compromising the former? The answer lies in the domain of translation. A uniform interpretation and application of EU law begins with the ways in which translators and jurist–linguists of the EU legislative bodies translate the original legislative draft texts into the various language versions. In the EU, law and language are inherently connected. This book critically assess contemporary translation practices in the EU legislative procedure, or “EU Translation,” and proposes an alternative, “source-oriented” approach that promises to better serve the policy objectives of the EU. On the one hand, the EU pursues legal integration, that is, the incremental harmonization and unification of its Member States’ laws, for the purpose of reducing national regulatory differences among Member States. On the other hand, in its commitment to the diversity of European languages, its legislative institutions enact legislative instruments in 24 languages. Contrary to the orthodox view in academic literature and to the current policies of the EU, this book suggests that the English language version should serve as the original and only authentic legislative text and that translation into the other language versions should avoid prioritizing clarity and fluency over syntactic correspondence and employ neologisms for distinctly EU legal concepts.