Volume 14
Artificial Intelligence and the Language of Law
This issue consist of three sections: Research Articles accepted after peer review about different topics; Comments and Reviews about recent topics, but without peer review process; a Special Issue section with peer revied articles about a focus topic.
The special issue is edited by Agata de Laforcade, Laure Clément-Wilz and Ilaria Cennamo.
This special issue addresses the challenges of legal translation in the European Union in the context of artificial intelligence. It follows a conference held in Paris in March 2024, supported by Université Paris Est Créteil and EUR FRAPP, ISIT–Panthéon Assas University, and the University of Turin, in partnership with the Maison Ile-de-France of CIUP. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that connects European law, juristinguistics, and translation studies. The special issue highlights how AI — situated at the intersection of these three fields — poses profound challenges to each of them. The contributing authors bring forward three central ideas. First, while AI enhances productivity and assists in translation tasks, it often falls short in ensuring contextual accuracy, terminological consistency, and sensitivity to legal nuance, thereby underscoring the continued need for human oversight. Second, the authors emphasize the crucial role of comparative law, deeply rooted in legal culture, in legal translation. AI is portrayed both as a source of concern and limitation, and as a potential ally in safeguarding and promoting diverse legal cultures. In this context, the importance of legal expertise in the human-led post-editing phase is strongly affirmed. Lastly, the special issue explores the effects of AI translation ethics and shows that legal translation is currently navigating at the intersection of human and machine intelligence, requiring transparence in the use of AI tools to preserve the cultural heritage rooted in EU multilingual law.