At the Words to Deeds Conference it struck me how many academics are writing about legal translation nowadays, and the texts they sometimes deal with are more what I think of as real-world translation texts, rather than bilingual Canadian statutes, for example. These texts sometimes even have the names of the parties blacked out, just the way I used to use real divorce documents with blacked-out names with my students in 1982 (before legal translation was a thing).

I chose a table workshop entitled Managing conceptual differences across legal systems. Our discussion made me think of Juliette’s mantra Building Bridges Between Academia and Practice, which I see has now been extended to include & Between Translation, Interpreting, and Legal Practitioners. Academics actually need non-university legal translators, and non-university legal translators would like to see their research. But maybe academics are mainly interested in building up their list of publications, and those publications appear online on sites which are very expensive to access – unless your university provides them. So that is my first problem about building bridges: what is the toll charge?

The day before the conference I was looking at the speakers’ bios and I found an article, just published online and downloadable free of charge, by Dr. Paulina E. Wilson, one of the speakers and heading our table. This is where I got it: Interjural incommensurability in criminal law. I just skimmed it – I don’t do Polish – and found it clear, comprehensible and containing a nice diagram of the definition of going equipped in English law. Now as some of us agreed on the table, it would be great to have access to all the material on comparative law being produced with translation in mind. Because a difficult legal translation requires more hours of research than a client is likely to pay, we are keen to at least see the work done by others. I could imagine collecting a database of articles, not even book chapters necessarily, that I could mine when I needed it. But there is a paywall around a lot of academic research.

Is there a list somewhere of all the sites which charge high fees for downloading? I am sure I’m being naive, because copyright and research funding require materials to be protected. But then what bridges are we going to build?

The Words to Deeds Conference, subtitled Legal Translation to the Next Level, was held in Gray’s Inn last Saturday. Many thanks to Juliette Scott for organizing the whole thing so elegantly and thoughtfully.
I have no intention of reviewing the conference. I did, when I first started this blog, review the ATA legal conference in New York, and I realized afterwards that it was a bad idea – you would never have time to analyse and describe all the contributions, you would be bound to leave something important out, and if you did produce something of the appropriate detail, it would be so long that nobody would read it.

Please note in my photo how tasteful the stationery was, and what you probably can’t see: all the pencils were sharpened by hand. You will find video clips on Youtube on how to sharpen a pencil by knife.

However, I will write something about some thoughts I had in discussions, in a following post.