The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law has finally appeared. (That is a link to OUP, where you can also see some of the material).

You can see the table of contents and more at Peter Tiersma’s website – which I recommend in general if you don’t already know it.

I was particularly interested in the articles on translation, but now I look at the titles, I see that most of them deal with jurisdictions with one legal system and more than one language. I don’t know about Susan Sarkevic, I just know that her book (New Approach to Legal Translation) had a lot of stuff on that kind of ‘translation’ of legislation. This is the – outdated – list on Peter Tiersma’s site:

III. Multilingualism and Translation

Michel Bastarache, The Interpretation of Bilingual Statutes
Jan Engberg, Word Meaning and the Globalized Legal Order
Susan Sarcevic, Challenges to the Legal Translator
Karen McAuliffe, Translating Laws in the EU
(Maria Teresa Turrel and Teresa Castiñeira, Issues Facing a Multilingual Legal System)

The last item has been replaced by an article on Fifty Years of Multilingual Interpretation in the European Union by Cornelius J.W. Baaij.

What I’m interested in is translation from one language and jurisdiction, especially civil law, to another language with a different jurisdiction, especially common law. I have never understood the various language versions of EU statutes to be translations, even if in some sense translation is involved.

Still, I would be interested to see what they say.

The book is very expensive but there is actually a Kindle version and you can get it from amazon.de. I find that quite rare with law books – usually if they appear in the UK or USA, I can’t get them electronically.