Globalization and Legal Translation: New Research Pathways

So far, legal translation studies have generally been concerned with multilingual legislation, which they have dissected using comparative law methods. The time seems to have come for a differentiated research that recognises various types of legal translation, including the (vast) category of translation by professionals for public authorities and business concerns. This latter category's context is rapidly changing. Globalization is aggravating the crisis of national legislation. First and foremost, networks of authorities have sprung up alongside international organisations. The texts translated are regulatory rather than prescriptive. Then, in the field of international commerce, a standardization of contracts is occurring. Globalized administrative and commercial varieties of English are no longer the English of the common law but, rather, a neutral or hybrid English that needs to be further sub-classified by reference to specific legal sectors. Furthermore, by reducing costs and deadlines, globalization and digitalization have forced translation to be economically efficient. Several legislative provisions now allow the translation of legal texts by way of extracts or summaries. In multilingual monitoring translators are being asked to assess and select the documents for translation themselves. The quality required is often that which is "sufficient" to achieve the sought-after goal. All these changes must be incorporated into the university education of translators (i.e. by including regulatory and contractual texts, neutral varieties of English, translations in reduced form, assessment and selection of texts and quality calibration).