8 The Linguist DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015
www.ciol.org.uk
FEATURES
Eleanor Sharpston, Advocate General of the EU Court
of Justice, examines language law in a multilingual context
W
hen I was a teaching Fellow at
King's College, Cambridge, a
young Eastern European
mathematician – an absolutely brilliant
academic – was introduced as a visitor into the
Fellowship for two terms. He was a charming
colleague. True, he only possessed 20 words
of English ('yes', 'please', 'thank you', 'later'),
but he also had a winning smile. He fitted in
seamlessly into the life of the college and the
faculty. He didn't need language for his work;
he had the language of mathematics, he had
symbols. It was a very successful visit.
However, if mathematics is at one end of
the spectrum, law is at the other. Law is
impossibly language-heavy. When you start
training as a law student, you write an essay
that you think is carefully crafted and subtle in
its arguments. It is then ripped to shreds by
your supervisor, who points out how imprecise
you have been in your use of language, how
inconsistent in your terminology. Eventually,
the message gets through: you have to keep
linguistic precision. It's not about elegant
variation; it's about consistency. (Although
legal French sometimes does do elegant
variation, which is disturbing if you are used
to legal English, because you don't know
whether they meant to say something else,
or were just being elegant.) Once you're fully
trained, if you do your legal work in a UK
court, you will spend days (or weeks) poring
over individual words, individual phrases. I
have spent a whole morning in the High Court
arguing about the presence – or, "My Lord,
the telling absence" – of a comma.
When law goes multilingual
What happens when you are working in the
multilingual Court of Justice of the European
Union (CJEU), in the fairytale Grand Duchy of
Luxembourg? Here, most people will speak to
you in any one of four languages, depending
on which one they think is going to be useful
as a means of communication: Moien, wéi
geet et? Bonjour, comment ça va? Guten
Morgen, wie geht's? 'Hello, how are you?'
The CJEU started as a little court housed
in the Villa Vauban. It is now in a sprawling
palace on the Kirchberg, with two beautiful
golden towers (we are threatened with a
third, even taller), and in these towers live our
translators. On a foggy day, the shafts
disappear into the mist above; but translators
working on the top floor can look down upon
the fog below. (Is there something symbolic
about that?) There are about 2,000 staff in the
CJEU, including more than 800 translators
and about 100 interpreters. Both are
supplemented by freelancers, as necessary.
A law unto itself ?
