Volumen 36 (2018): Heft 1 (December 2018)

In the context of the quantitative shift in the translation field, both pragmatic and legal, this article aims to return to the role of interpretation and meaning concepts and to place them back at the centre of legal translation concerns. Starting from the observation of the necessity of interpretation, it is a question of highlighting the social anchoring of any translation as an act of communication and the inadequacy of the paradigm of equivalence (Sandrini, 2017) which results from it. Based on Schütz’s theory, the concepts of relevance and stock of knowledge and their role in translation will be highlighted (Schütz, 2004b). Finally, the outlines of a practical method of translation based on relevance and usage (Wittgenstein, 2004) will be outlined.

In the extant literature in Japan, the description of criminal cases involving foreigners goes back to around the fifth century; however, detailed depictions of language problems requiring legal interpreters started to appear in the Edo period (1603–1868). The cases of an Italian missionary who entered Japan illegally in 1709 and the robbery of Ainu graves by British consular officers in 1865 presented communication difficulties between the interrogator and accused in criminal procedures. This is common even today. This paper introduces the history of legal interpreting with reference to high profile cases, and reviews changes in communication issues in criminal proceedings involving non-Japanese speaking defendants in modern Japan. It also presents prospects regarding the shift in attitude among legal practitioners toward legal interpreting against the backdrop of recent judicial reforms including the introduction of a lay judge system and visualisation of the investigation process.

Legal translation has played an important part in the contact between different people and countries in the history, and it is playing an even more significant role in the increasingly globalized world nowadays. This study uses case study method and the data analysis tool voyant to explore smart learning models of certified legal translators and interpreters that they are supposed to grasp. Through the analysis of the guiding case No. 75 of The Supreme People’s Court of The People’s Republic of China, the graphs show that the legal translator possesses some good competences, though there are some defects in the translation that fail to exhibit the integration of all the presupposed legal translational competences completely. The results find that the prerequisites about knowledge of comparative laws, legal languages and forensic linguistics are the external framework of smart learning models; and the legal translational language competence, legal translational knowledge structures, legal translational strategic competence and context of situation are the internal model. The whole model is multi-componential, interactive, dynamic and developed.