Clarity is an international association promoting plain legal language. It publishes the journal Clarity in May and November.
You can get PDFs of old issues on the website. I hope the latest May 2005 edition will be available online in November!
It isn’t written for translators. But it can be very useful in indicating the meanings of archaic legalese and indicating what is a term of art and what isn’t.
But the latest edition was really interesting for legal translators. Here’s the cover (click for an enlargement):
The best of all were the articles by William Robinson and Ian Frame, two translators (Robinson is no longer a translator, but in the Legal Revisers Group), on why the English of EU legislation is as it is. I’ll post a brief summary when I get round to it.
I’m really looking forward to being able to read these articles, as I’ve just stumbled across yet another piece of EU legislation that is exceptionally badly worded (in English) and contains rather a large number of errors and potential ambiguities (Regulation 809/2004 implementing the Prospectus Directive 2003/71/EC). To my mind, this poor quality of legislative drafting is merely an ECJ case waiting to happen…