Since the mid-1990s, when Lawrence Venuti published his book The Translator’s Invisibility, there has existed, in the eld of literary translation, a debate on the (in)visibility, power and inuence of translators on literature and academic theory. This paper shifts that debate to the eld of legal translation, focusing on the role of and work done by lawyer-linguists at the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in terms of their (in)visibility in the process of text production of that court and in the texts themselves. Data presented here demonstrate that, in the ECJ itself, as in other elds, translation tends to be “a largely misunderstood. . . practice” (Venuti, 2008: vii), but that recent shifts in dynamics within that institution are leading to changes in perceptions of translation and more ‘visibility’ for translators in the process of production of that court’s case law, although they remain largely invisible in the context of the texts themselves. However, the invisibility of translators in this context necessarily leads to a certain amount of power and inuence on the texts they produce. Since those texts, in particular judgments of the ECJ, are intended to have force of law and to be applied uniformly throughout the 28 EU member states, that power and inuence is not insignicant. This paper analyses some examples of such ‘inuence’ on ECJ case law, and thus on EU law more generally. If we are to develop a full and nuanced understanding of the case law of the ECJ, the power of translators should not be ignored.

Comparative lawyers are daily faced with the need to translate in order to compare, although they are not professional translators. One can thus wonder whether Comparative Law can contribute to the eld of Legal Translation and how, especially by studying how these lawyers overcome (or fail to do so) translational and comparative obstacles that they are faced with, and by examining the procedures applied to study and describe foreign legal systems. This article aims to unveil the most relevant translational procedures used in four publications of ve volumes in the eld of Comparative Law, which seek to introduce, disseminate and deepen the knowledge of Brazilian Law among French lawyers and conversely the knowledge of French Law among Brazilian lawyers.

This article, theoretically grounded on Francis Aubert’s writings, who attempted to shed light on the dierences between strategies and procedures applied to certied translations and free legal translations – stressing a more literalizing trend in the former when compared to the latter –, aims at studying a real case of legal translation, within the sworn translation scope. In conclusion, besides clearly acknowledging in the case under analysis the trend proposed by Aubert, it was deemed signicant to highlight the civil and criminal liabilities imposed upon certied translators by the decree governing the position, in the purpose of providing the study with another explanatory element to the literalizing trend perceived by Aubert.

This article offers a reflection on the training of Certied Translators (CT), focusing especially on the legal arena, and presents the ndings of a project that is currently being developed in the area. In Brazil, a CT is an individual that translates public documents whose translation is legally required in the country. That individual will have been examined, but has no employment relationship with the State. No academic qualication or professional training is required in order to be a CT. In addition to providing an explanation of the requirements underlying the public examination of a CT and some theories of Translation Studies, this research presents a project that aims to collect a parallel corpus and analyze the trends of translation of legal terms, in order to assist the translator in translating these terms between the pairwise Portuguese/Spanish. According to Ulsh (1971: 10), more than 85% of the Portuguese vocabulary – and especially the lexicon – are likely to have Spanish cognates. The translator must be careful enough to search for terms in context, rather than trust the strong similarities between the two languages.    

In this article, we apply a method of analysis of contrastive textology in the legal context, analysing two text genres that have a comparable function in Brazilian and German criminal procedures: “denúncia” and “ Anklageschrift”. The purpose is to bring to light similarities and dierences that help translators to understand the source text and to dene invariance criteria and translation methods and procedures, as well as to write the target text for the other legal culture. At the end, the potential of the research is shown by the prospective broadening of the focus from individual text specimen to textual networks.

The European Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings should have been in force by 2014 in all EU countries, and it will further exacerbate the existing problems of finding people to provide effective interlingual and intercultural communication, especially in cases where cultural norms differ, as in the case of family law. Despite the efforts to homogenize European systems, much legal language continues to be used and interpreted according to local cultural norms, even when there is some agreement as to the legal terminology at a more general European level. In this paper we focus on criminal cases involving family problems such as cases of minors who have been abducted and taken to another country by one parent, without the consent of the other. We shall trace the cultural and terminological dificulties faced by all concerned during the legal process. Ultimately, this research aims to contribute to the perception of the diculties in applying the European Directive 2010/64/EU at the everyday level demanded by the agents of the law, many of whom have little perception of legal systems or cultures outside their own and share the general public’s lack of awareness of the nature of translation.

Translating legal texts is usually perceived as being daunting by Translation students, who normally lack legal training, and it becomes even more intimidating when legal texts must be rendered in the second language. However, translator trainees must be equipped with the skills required to successfully translate legal texts into their second language and subsequently meet this real market demand. Most legal translator training programmes seem to particularly focus on the development of thematic competence, with Law-related elements playing an outsized role and other abilities, such as technological competence, being downplayed. In this article, it is our purpose to highlight how ad hoc monolingual corpora can be useful for those who engage in the translation of specialised, legal texts into their second language, especially as corpora help retrieve phraseological and discursive information on which to base translation decisions in a more informed manner.