A multilingual approach for promoting worldwide open access to law

Internationalization and increasing globalization of market economy and social patterns of life have created a situation where the need for legal information from foreign countries and from different legal systems is greater than ever before. This requirement is not new, but it is now becoming more and more crucial and hard to meet under the pressure of the rapid and complex cross-border transactions occurring between people of different legal cultures and languages. Nowadays improving knowledge of the law is imperative for the benefit of a wide category of users: legal professionals, businessmen, scholars and laymen, interacting as they are in an environment of increasing cross-border relations where powerful information and communication technologies are available, greatly facilitating access to legal material despite its specificity and complexity. However, language barriers still hinders the exchange of legal information and universal access to law. There is no doubt that the exchange of information is largely dependent on language, to be intended not only as a system of symbols, but also as a means of communication and thus as a tool for mediating between different cultures. If we consider the language of the law, we notice that the properties of such language have a major impact on the exchange of legal information. Unlike a number of technical and scientific disciplines, where a fair correspondence exists between concepts across languages, serious difficulties arise in interpreting law across countries and languages, due to the system-bound nature of legal terminology. In fact, each legal order is situated within a complex social and political framework originating from the history, traditions and habits of a particular community. Multilingualism in the law domain is almost unanimously perceived as a very complex issue. It is a highly debated topic not only among professionals and scholars of comparative law, linguistics, translation theory and practice (de Groot 1998), but also among government officials in institutional settings at national and international level, as demonstrated by the efforts made for the preservation and management of the plurality of languages in a number of countries as a guarantee of cultural diversity. Europe as whole in particular is a typical example of multi-language and multi-system environment where decisions on linguistic policy are now receiving considerable attention (Gallo 1999). The European Union subscribes to full multilingualism in its 23 official languages, causing a huge amount of translation work for legal documentation. Linguistic policy is faced with the economic and practical problems of handling so many languages. Hence, there is a certain pressure to simplify, at least for certain contexts and specific types of documentation. Two opposite