13th Institute of Jurilinguistics – The Monolingualism of Law: Translations, Treasons, Distortions
The law speaks its own language. Any legal operation or statement of the law entails a linguistic transformation. For example, humans become “legal persons” and animals become “things.” Thus, the law cannot only describe, but must necessarily modify the situations it encounters. The language of the law qualifies, categorizes, reformulates and even euphemizes the situations of the litigants and their relationships. Such processes may distort reality, and in doing so deny the existence of important social problems. It is in this sense that we sometimes speak of the difficulty of adapting the language of the law to the social world.
This linguistic transformation affects the situation and realities of marginalized groups. Some litigants are isolated from the law; their concerns erased, delegitimized or discredited. For example, the sex and gender binaries that underlie the legal categories of “men” and “women” exclude non-binary persons. Similarly, terms like “mother” and “father” leave little room for social situations of same-sex parenthood. Conversely, legal language may also serve an alleviative function when conflicts are expressed in legal forms. “Legal personhood” may succeed in accommodating the infinite diversity of human identities, and “damage” may be more suitable than “wrong committed.”
In any case, the translation of reality into legal language is fraught with consequences. This Summer Institute aims to identify the linguistic operations that conceal, distort and deny the reality of marginalized people, as well as to explore the harmonizing function of legal language. These are key issues that jurilinguists, translators, legal practitioners and scholars alike face on a daily basis.
This event is eligible for inclusion as continuing legal education hours, as reported by members of the Barreau du Québec.
