Translation problems specific to documents in ICTY trials

Alice Copple-Tosic, Borislava Sasic, Ana Stefanovski, Conference and Language Services Section ICTY

The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is one of several ad hoc courts that use what is called a hybrid legal system consisting of concepts from both customary and continental law. One of the consequences of this system is that the written case files are much larger and include a wide variety of texts, ranging from witness statements, newspaper articles, combat reports, autopsies, expert reports to all manner of laws and judgements. This paper will present an overview of the types of texts needed in the courtroom so that the judges, who dominate the trials, may be properly informed of all the relevant facts. Each type of document will be analysed from the viewpoint of the translation problems involved

In search of equivalence

Radmila Schneider, translator ICTY

A legal translator’s task is not only to achieve linguistic equivalence: the translated text – a court decision, a judgment – should have the same legal effect as the original. Working in the context of the international criminal law, translator is a mediator not only between two languages, but also between two legal systems: in the case of the ICTY, between common law and civil law.

The intention of this paper is to illustrate some of the difficulties in translation from English into Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and between two legal systems, using as one of apparently benign examples the notion of “reasonable” (reasonable trier of fact, reasonable doubt, reasonable cause, etc.) which embodies the empiricist, inductive universe of thought as background of Anglo-American law, and which can, if always translated literally, be perceived as dissonant or incongruent within the conceptual and terminological context of continental law.

Legal translation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities

Kari Liiri, Chef de division, Cour de Justice des CE

Multilingualism characterises the activities of the European Court of Justice. In reality the Court consists of three different courts of law: the Court of Justice, the Court of First Instance, and the Civil Service Tribunal. The following linguistic principles apply to all three courts.

The statutory basis is laid down in Regulation 1/58 determining the official languages on the European Communities. The rules of procedure of the Court of Justice govern questions concerning language use in proceedings before the Court. On the basis of these rules, a language of the case is determined to each action brought before the Court.

The starting point is that in direct actions the applicant has the right to choose one of the official languages to be used in proceedings. In preliminary ruling cases, the language of the case is always the language used in the respective national proceedings in which the language has been determined according to national provisions. The language of the case is used throughout the proceedings, and as for the judgement, only the version written in the language of the case is authentic.

In order to meet these linguistic requirements, the DG Translation of the Court, the Institution's largest service comprising of almost half of the Court's staff, is composed of lawyer-linguists each of whom has a law degree and a thorough knowledge of several official languages. All official languages are used as source languages as well as target languages. Therefore translations cover all possible combinations of the official languages.

The challenge in the everyday work of lawyer-linguists consists in performing comprehensive legal background research concerning the legal system of the Member State from which the text originates and comparing the legal notions and institutions with those of the Community legal order in order to finally produce a translation that not only reflects the original but is also accessible to the reader. All this takes place within strict deadlines and under significant time pressure.