NAFTA: Law & Business Review of the Americas provides a medium for understanding & implementing NAFTA. It emphasizes the legal aspects of NAFTA & doing business in the Americas. Coverage also includes the expansion & growth of NAFTA, & the overall impact (business, financial, economic, legal) upon the current three signatories & upon other interested countries in Latin America & elsewhere in the world. The journal is divided into three main sections: (I) Articles; (II) Implementation, covering the way that the United States, Canada, & Mexico are implementing NAFTA; & (III) Beyond NAFTA, which considers the developments occurring elsewhere in Latin & Central America, the Caribbean, & Europe. Topics of particular concern to this journal include free trade, direct investment, licensing, finance, taxation, litigation & dispute resolution, & organizational aspects of NAFTA. Besides the technical, legal pieces, the journal includes various policy oriented articles, economic pieces, & business strategy articles. NAFTA: Law & Business Review of the Americas achieves a unique balance in its coverage between practical & policy implications of NAFTA, covering both matters of immediate interest as well as those relating to reform of legal, business, economic, social, & political structures in the Western world. This approach makes it a valuable resource for both practitioners & academics in the field.

Language and Legal Interpretation in International Law sheds light on the complicated process of language interpretation that adjudicators (judges and arbitrators) and legal practitioners adopt when they act within international legal systems. The book also analyzes the role that language and the diversity of languages and national legal cultures plays in different international legal systems.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of institutional translation issues related to the development of international law and policies for supranational integration and governance. These issues are explored from various angles in selected papers by guest specialists and findings of a large-scale research project led by the editor. Focus is placed on key methodological and policy aspects of legal communication and translation quality in a variety of institutional settings, including several comparative studies of the United Nations and European Union institutions. The first book of its kind on institutional translation with a focus on quality of legal communication, this work offers a unique combination of perspectives drawn together through a multilayered examination of methods (e.g. corpus analysis, comparative law for translation and terminological analysis), skills and working procedures. The chapters are organized into three sections: (1) contemporary issues and methods; (2) translation quality in law- and policy-making and implementation; and (3) translation and multilingual case-law.

Capturing the Change: Universalising Tendencies in Legal Interpretation Joanna Jemielniak and Przemys aw Mik aszewicz International and supranational integration on the European continent, as well as the harmonisation of the rules of international trade and the accompanying dev- opment and global popularity of the resolution of commercial disputes through arbitration, constantly exerts a considerable in uence on modern legal systems. The sources of each of these phenomena are different, and their action is dissimilar. Each can be described as reaching either from the top to the bottom, through the direct involvement of interested States and consequently affecting their internal legal s- tems (international and supranational integration; harmonisation of trade regulations through public international law instruments), or bottom-up, as a result of activity by private parties, leading to the achievement of uniform practices and standards (ar- tration, lex mercatoria). Nonetheless, they both enrich national legal cultures and contribute to transgressing the limits of national (local) particularisms in creating, interpreting and applying the law. The aim of this book is to demonstrate how these processes have in uenced the interpretation of law, how they have shaped the methods and techniques of the interpretation and with what consequences for the outcomes of the interpretative procedures. In assessing the extent of this in uence, due regard must be paid to the fact that the interpretation of law is not, in principle, directly determined by the provisions of law itself.

The discipline of translation studies has gained increasing importance at the beginning of the 21st century as a result of rapid globalization and the development of computer-based translation methods. Today, changing political, economic, health, and environmental realities across the world are generating previously unknown inter-language communication challenges that can only be understood through a socially-oriented and data-driven approach. The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices draws on a wide array of case studies from all over the world to demonstrate the value of different forms of translation - written, oral, audiovisual - as social practices that are essential to achieve sustainability, accessibility, inclusion, multiculturalism, and multilingualism. Edited by Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa, this timely collection illustrates the manifold interactions between translation studies and the social and natural sciences, enabling for the first time the exchange of research resources and methods between translation and other domains' experts. Twenty-nine chapters by international scholars and professional translators apply translation studies methods to a wide range of fields, including healthcare, environmental policy, geological and cultural heritage conservation, education, tourism, comparative politics, conflict mediation, international law, commercial law, immigration, and indigenous rights. The articles engage with numerous languages, from European and Latin American contexts to Asian and Australian languages, giving unprecedented weight to the translation of indigenous languages. The Handbook highlights how translation studies generate innovative solutions to long-standing and emerging social issues, thus reformulating the scope of this discipline as a socially-oriented, empirical, and ethical research field in the 21st century.

English-french-spanish-german dictionary of terminology relating to law.

This book offers an introduction to the many facets of multilingualism in a changing world. It begins with an overview of the multiplicity of human languages and their geographic distribution, before moving on to the key question of what multilingualism actually is and what is understood by terms such as 'mother tongue', 'native speaker', and 'speech community'. In the chapters that follow, Florian Coulmas systematically explores multilingualism with respect to the individual, institutions, cities, nations, and cyberspace. In each of these domains, the dynamics of language choice are undergoing changes as a result of economic, political, and cultural forces. Against this background, two chapters discuss the effects of linguistic diversity on the integration and separation of language and society, before a final chapter describes and assesses research methods for investigating multilingualism. Each chapter concludes with problems and questions for discussion, which place the topic in a real-world context. The book explores where, when, and why multilingualism came to be regarded as a problem, and why it presents a serious challenge for linguistic theory today. It provides the basic tools to analyse different kinds of multilingualism at both the individual and society level, and will be of interest to students of linguistics, sociology, education, and communication studies.

What challenges face jurisdictions that attempt to conduct law in two or more languages? How does choosing a legal language affect the way in which justice is delivered? Answers to these questions are vital for the 75 officially bilingual and multilingual states of the world, as well as for other states contemplating a move towards multilingualism. Arguably such questions have implications for all countries in a world characterized by the pressures of globalization, economic integration, population mobility, decolonization, and linguistic re-colonization. For lawyers, addressing such challenges is made essential by the increased frequency and scale of transnational legal dealings and proceedings, as well as by the lengthening reach of international law. But it is not only policy makers, legislators, and other legal practitioners who must think about such questions. The relationship between societal multilingualism and law also raises questions for the burgeoning field of language and law, which posits--among other tenets--the centrality of language in legal processes. In this book, Janny H.C. Leung examines key aspects of legal multilingualism. Drawing extensively on case studies, she describes the implications of the legal, practical, and ideological dilemmas encountered in a given country when it becomes bilingual or multilingual, discussing such issues as: how legal certainty and the linguistic ideology of authenticity may be challenged in a multilingual jurisdiction; how courts balance the language preferences of different courtroom participants; and what historical, socio-political and economic factors may influence the decision to cement a given language as a jurisdiction's official language. Throughout, Leung elaborates a theory of "symbolic jurisprudence" to explore common dilemmas found across countries, despite their varied political and cultural settings, and argues that linguistic equality as proclaimed and practiced today is a shallow kind of equality. Although officially multilingual jurisdictions appear to be more inclusive than their monolingual counterparts, they run the risk of disguising substantive inequalities and displacing real efforts for more progressive social change. This is the first book to offer overarching discussion of how such issues relate to each other, and the first systematic study of legal multilingualism as a global phenomenon.

In an era marked by processes of economic, political and legal integration that are arguably unprecedented in their range and impact, the translation of law has assumed a significance which it would be hard to overstate. The following situations are typical. A French law school is teaching French law in the English language to foreign exchange students. Some US legal scholars are exploring the possibility of developing a generic or transnational constitutional law. German judges are referring to foreign law in a criminal case involving an honour killing committed in Germany with a view to ascertaining the relevance of religious prescriptions. European lawyers are actively working on the creation of a common private law to be translated into the 24 official languages of the European Union. Since 2004, the World Bank has been issuing reports ranking the attractiveness of different legal cultures for doing business. All these examples raise in one way or the other the matter of translation from a comparative legal perspective. However, in today’s globalised world where the need to communicate beyond borders arises constantly in different guises, many comparatists continue not to address the issue of translation. This edited collection of essays brings together leading scholars from various cultural and disciplinary backgrounds who draw on fields such as translation studies, linguistics, literary theory, history, philosophy or sociology with a view to promoting a heightened understanding of the complex translational implications pertaining to comparative law, understood both in its literal and metaphorical senses.

This book introduces and explores the concept of multilingual law. Providing an overview as to what is 'multilingual law', the study establishes a new discourse based on this concept, which has hitherto lacked recognition for reasons of complexity and multidisciplinarity. The need for such a discourse now exists and is becoming urgent in view of the progress being made towards European integration and the legal and factual foundation for it in multilingualism and multilingual legislation. Covering different types of multilingual legal orders and their distinguishing features, as well as the basic structure of legal systems, the author studies policy formation, drafting, translation, revision, terminology and computer tools in connection with the legislative and judicial processes. Bringing together a range of diverse legal and linguistic ideas under one roof, this book is of importance to legal-linguists, drafters and translators, as well as students and scholars of legal linguistics, legal translation and revision.