The Court of Justice of the European Communities produces a multilingual jurisprudence, consisting primarily of collegiate judgments drafted by jurists in a language that is generally not their mother tongue. That jurisprudence undergoes many pennutations of translation into and out of up to 20 different languages and is - necessarily shaped by the dynamics within the Court and by the linguistic cultural compromises at play in the production process. The, main difficulty in the production of that multilingual jurisprudence is reconciling the notions of 'law' and 'translation'. The Court aims to produce statements of law that can be understood in exactly the same way in every language in which they are published. That aim does not sit easily with translation theory, which claims that the act of translation is an approximation. The actors at the heart of the dilemma are the Court's lawyer-linguists, whose job it is to translate the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice into all of the official languages of the EU. The result of their efforts and struggle to reconcile the two sets of nonns (of translation and law) is a compromise, the existence of which is widely acknowledged and widely accepted within the small legal community of the Court. It is precisely because everyone in this community is aware of that compromise that the institution is actually able to function. The present thesis is a detailed study of the process behind the production of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice and the role of language and translation in that process. The multilingual nature of that jurisprudence has implications for the development of EU law, and the approximation inherent in the production and translation of such jurisprudence is illustrative of the limitations of a multilingual legal system. The thesis makes explicit that which the majority of actors at the Court, and indeed at the EU level in general, already know - that EU law is a multicultural, multilingual construct which functions by way of approximation, and that its continued effectiveness is dependent upon its hybrid nature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:484998 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | McAuliffe, Karen Ann |
| Publisher | Queen's University Belfast |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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