A Pragmatic Approach to Translating International Law

With the rise of international law in a world of globalization and sociopolitical conflicts an open debate is raised on the traditional approach in translating multilingual legal texts. Theorists and professionals argue that relying on the general guidelines of fidelity to preserve the letter of the law has become too restrictive. The premise is that disregarding the discoursal context and legal dimension of legal texts may lead to ambiguous and even erroneous translations. The book depicted a comparative study of the case of UNSC Resolution 1757 (2007) by building a dialogue between theories of translation language discourse and law to highlight the shortcomings of the traditional methods. This approach is derived from recent studies led by Legal Linguists based on the Canadian Co-drafting Experience in bijural contexts. Cases of ambiguities were explained through the particular relation between semantics and pragmatics found in the SC legal and diplomatic discourses where language may become a tool used by the negotiators to serve their political interests. Therefore Pragmatics is indispensable when linguistic means fail to ensure reliability of legal texts.