Legal terms that travel: Constraints to presenting national legal terminology to international audiences

This chapter discusses national legal terminology used in texts allowing for the dissemination of national legal knowledge, namely translated domestic legislation, academic literature, and international case law. The purpose of the chapter is to investigate the transfer of national legal terminology from its original national context to a context of a different kind, a process that requires a more or less overt form of translation. The chapter thus explores seven constraints (target audience, lingua franca, legal system of reference, comparative law methods, intertextuality, type of publication, editorial policies and linguistic precedent) that are imposed on text producers (translators, scholars, and drafters) when faced with national legal terminology crossing the ‘natural’ borders of the legal system which conceived it.