Legal Translation. A Survey of Traditional Problems and New Challenges

Before examining which can be considered the main challenges with which legal translation has been dealing with in the last decades, the work attempts to outline a map of its traditional problems, starting from a twofold ambiguity of “legal language”. The first ambiguity stems from its double dimension as ordinary and technical language. The second ambiguity con- cerns the three different uses of “legal language” according to which it can refer to (i) the language of law, (ii) the language of legal dogmatics, and (iii) the language of adjudication. Prior to the map of the traditional problems of legal translation deriving from the combina- torial result of the terms of either ambiguity, attention will be paid to the interdisciplinary nature of legal translation and to the semantic and pragmatic main features of legal language