Intercultural traits in legal translation

This paper runs in parallel to a national research project on interculturality in Languages for Special Purposes and investigates, through a comparative approach of different legal systems, the problems related to the translation of legal texts in multilingual and multilegal organizations. After an introductory analysis on the aspects of precision and ambiguity that coexist in international law texts, the paper takes on an intercultural slant in illustrating the translation strategies and choices used to transfer legal messages across different cultures and legal systems, namely English and Italian. To this purpose, the last section presents the results gleaned from a previous study on comparative law, which led to the creation of a legal glossary on human rights and criminal law. This terminological work, compiled for the translators of the European Commission in Brussels and Luxembourg, is entirely based on a source corpus of international criminal law: a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (Case of Rowe and Davis vs. the United Kingdom ).