How culture has been understood and analyzed in legal interpreting and translation

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Exploring the different notions of what LIT practice and scholarly analysis is and should be is required in order to establish a dialogue between the different perspectives. Distinct developments and applications of the notion of culture are key in locating the differences between LIT schools. The paper links notions, paradigms, and methods to how LIT and culture are understood and proposes ways to foster cross-fertilization between the different approaches from an integrative perspective. This chapter argues that how culture is conceptualized lies at the root of long-standing positions in the field of LIT, including the professional profile of those who carry out the activity, which is understood in dichotomous terms (translators or lawyers regardless of external factors) or contextualized (in localized balances of priorities and restrictions correlated with competencies). The double character of LIT, symbolic and communicative, is analyzed as the basis of different translation policies in institutional settings and also of disciplinary discrepancies in translation methods (in a continuum between free and literal), which has been maintained and sustained as one of the major debates in translation studies but also in the struggle between law and translation studies to establish their jurisdiction over LIT. This debate is linked to another major theme - the role of LIT practitioners. It is suggested that the definition of that role is closely linked to how legal systems, as cultural systems, define and organize justice and embrace the myths of law (such as the universality of norms or lack of authorship) which have an impact on key notions such as translatability and equivalence. The latter is reviewed as an intercultural transfer mechanism from the perspective of the evolution of law, which is presented as an ontological network. Contributions that have addressed this evolution in legal studies are articulated in two schools: one that sees those transfers as the result of contacts between networks preserving the integrity of the links between existing nodes, and another that focuses on those transplants that transmute relations within the receiving network due to a lack of correspondence between the new node (the legal transplant) and the ontological network hosting it. It is argued that the study of these alterations, of how translation between legal cultures impacts legal systems is an underexplored area, as is the historical and intercultural review of translation norms in LIT through a description of the translation genres or transgenres, of the roles and habitus of translators and interpreters, and of the symbolic value of LIT in legal and political systems. Besides other frequently visited topics, such as textual and terminological studies triggered by the evolution of law and society, this chapter concludes that the constant evolution of notions, methods, and perspectives offers a positive diagnosis of LIT studies, their relevance, and adaptability.

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