Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translation studies as currently practiced in the academy concentrates heavily on the circulation of books, especially books of literary merit. But despite the six-figure numbers bandied about in our survey of global translation, literary works make up only a small part of translation in the world today.

Legal texts are translated in vaster quantities than books and in more varied directions. Dreary as it may seem to all but legal eagles, the translation of law is a prerequisite for the construction and maintenance of a global society. Without it, business and diplomacy would come to a stop. But there’s something quite important to learn from it. Law is the very model of an untranslatable text, because the language of law is self-enclosed and refers to nothing outside of itself. In practice, however, laws do get translated, because they must.

In France you can say impossible n’est pas français when you want to assert that something hard can nonetheless be done. “Impossible” doesn’t exist in other languages, either, when it comes to translation. Translation is a voluntary act.

Layfolk the world over know why the law is untranslatable. It’s written in a language of its own that is almost impossible to understand, and what can’t be understood can’t be translated. We pay our lawyers good money just to reassure us that they understand the small print on the contract we’re about to sign without reading it through to the end.

The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not. They don’t refer to anything outside of the social institution and intellectual system that the law constructs. You may have a pretty good idea what murder means when you use it in an English sentence, but what looks like murder to you may be first degree, second degree, manslaughter, homicide, or even collateral damage in a legal description of the event. The offense committed is determined by the legal system in force in the place where the killing occurred, and within that system it is determined only by the definitions of the offenses that the system distinguishes—by the words of the law as it has come to be written down.

In the first years of the twentieth century, a professor of linguistics at the University of Geneva gave a course of lectures about the nature of human languages. Ferdinand de Saussure never wrote the lectures down, but after his early death in 1913 students put their notes together and produced a Course in General Linguistics, which has served as a breviary for much of the thinking about language that has gone on since then. Whether or not Saussure’s teaching should be regarded as the last word on what language is overall, it’s an excellent tool for getting at the reasons why the language of law is such a tricky thing to translate.[135]

Saussure was already very learned in the history of languages, but in his lectures on general linguistics he sought to explain what a language is as a whole and systematic entity at any given point in time. His account was grounded in what was then a revolutionary new definition of the linguistic sign. A sign possesses both a material existence as a string of sounds or written marks, which he called the “signifier” (in French, signifiant); but it necessarily also has a power to mean—a “significandum,” or signifié. The sign is neither a signifier nor a significandum, but their combination, in a pairing so tight that the one can no more be separated from the other than the two sides of a single sheet. However, unlike a piece of paper, the two sides of the sign are attached to each other for no necessary reason—they just are attached that way. A sign in Saussure’s teaching has five special qualities. It has to be inherited, because the signs of a language can never be invented on the spot. It has to be shared, because signs mean what we agree they should mean, not just what some individual thinks they mean. It has to be unchangeable, because nobody can turn table into cable just for fun and still be using the same sign. It has to be free to be combined with other signs in an act of speech or writing. Finally, the inner relationship between signifier and signified that makes the two together coalesce as a sign has to be arbitrary: you can’t explain why the letters T-A-B-L-E as distinct from any others can be used to refer to a “table” except by saying they just do.