Vol. 7 (2018)
EU Legal Culture and Translation

Special Issues

EU Legal Culture and Translation

Published 28.06.2018

  • Vilelmini Sosoni
    • ,
  • Łucja Biel

Vilelmini Sosoni
Department of Foreign Languages, Translation & Interpreting, Ionian University

Łucja Biel
Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue of JLL on EU legal culture and translation. The introduction gives an overview of the papers comprised in the special issue and provides the theoretical background to set the scene for the discussion in the papers. The special issue is a follow-up on the panel organised at the Language and Law in a World of Media, Globalisation and Social Conflicts conference at the University of Freiburg. We argue that the EU legal culture is a perfect case in point for the study of the intersection between law and language. Due to the extreme degree of mediation and filtering of law through the EU’s official languages, the EU legal culture emerges through translation as a hybrid supranational pan-European construct with mutual dependencies on national legal cultures. The contributions to the special issues address various aspects of the law and language intersection in the EU context: the role of English as the EU’s lingua franca, the impact of national legal cultures on legal translation, strategic ambiguity and its interpretation by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the impact of EU integration on legal languages, and finally, framing and ideology in EU legal translation. Overall, by approaching the EU legal culture from various perspectives, this special issue refines our understanding of how the EU legal culture is affected by multilingual translation.

Cite as: Sosoni & Biel, JLL 7 (2018), 1–7, DOI: 10.14762/jll.2018.001

Keywords

EU legal culture, multilingualism, EU translation, EU law, legal translation, EU terminology, language and law, hybridity

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