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12 The Linguist DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015 www.ciol.org.uk THRELFORD LECTURE set out the problem, but did not explain the national legislation. You cannot determine if tax legislation is protective or not without knowing what it says. The case was handled by my most senior référendaire, who spent three days with a translator colleague (communicating mainly in French as well as some Hungarian), researching the tax structure in Hungary. I discussed the case with my référendaire in English, and then at the hearing I checked everything with counsel for Hungary to obtain confirmation of what the law said. We then wrote the Opinion. All that would have been impossible without the help of the Hungarian lawyer-linguist. I am working on another Hungarian case at the moment. It involves (yet another) air passenger seeking compensation. The passenger sold his claim to a company called Flight refund, based in the UK, which then tried to issue a European payment Order against Lufthansa in Hungary. Given that the flight was between newark (UsA) and the UK, you may wonder why the case was running in Hungary. The answer seems to be that the official Hungarian translation of the Montreal Convention doesn't look like the text in English or French. From the Hungarian version, simply being in the territory of a Contracting party to the Convention might be thought to be sufficient basis on which to found jurisdiction. The English and French versions indicate that you not only have to be in the territory of a Contracting party, but must also be within one of three situations. We found this out thanks only to a careful, professional footnote by one of our translators, who had realised that the Hungarian text appeared to have four bases for jurisdiction, whereas the English and French text had three. (We've now, incidentally, discovered a further problem: somewhere buried in the paperwork sent to us by the Hungarian court was a letter (in Hungarian) saying that the basis of the claim wasn't the Montreal Convention at all, but regulation no 261/2004.) My final example is of the Advocate General improvising. We don't have many Advocates General at the Court, but, as at the Windmill Theatre, 'the show must go on'. My much respected spanish colleague, Advocate General Dámaso ruiz Jarabo Colomer, was discovered dead one morning. We were all terribly shocked, but we also knew that we had to carry on while spain appointed a successor. so, the seven other Advocates General took in those of Dámaso's cases that needed to be dealt with immediately. I got four and borrowed the référendaires who had been working on them with him. This is where you really understand that we work in the Golden Towers of Babel, because in three of those cases, a partial draft had already been prepared in spanish. I'm the British Advocate General: I normally write in English; I write in French for the urgent procedure because there is no time to translate. now I had a draft in spanish. What was I going to do? Facing a similar problem, my colleague, Advocate General Kokott required the drafts to be translated into German and got her own référendaires to take them over. My own team was working flat out and couldn't take on extra work, and I had studied spanish at university. In a moment of rashness, I decided to stay in spanish for the three cases with existing drafts. now, spanish is a beautiful language, with golden curlicues. This is particularly true of rather ornate, juridical spanish, which is like baroque-with-cherubs. I thought I had been absolutely ruthless. Time and again I'd said to the référendaire, 'What's that phrase doing?' and when he replied 'It helps to round out the sentence,' I would say, 'Take it out, we don't need it.' (He nearly cried.) The resulting spanish text sounded – in spanish – absolutely like sharpston. It had a kind of Yorkshire directness to it. We then needed a French version for the judges to work from in the délibéré, as well as an English version. nobody reading a sharpston Opinion in English is going to believe it to be a translation. Even though the footnote says 'lengua original español', they will see 'sharpston' as the Advocate General and 'know' that the English text is the original. so I had three texts that I was trying to line up: an English text, which was a translation, a spanish original, and a French translation for the Court. After some work, the spanish and French were more or less there. Then I started reading the English; and after a few pages I thought, 'This woman is being evasive. she's not quite telling it the way it is'. I may have sounded like sharpston in spanish, but I didn't sound like sharpston in English. That was a very interesting lesson. I hope I have illustrated how vital language and the work of linguists and interpreters are to the functioning of the CJEU. In a sense, it's like the bloodstream. The bloodstream gets on quietly with its job, but without it, the body would not work. similarly, without the linguistic input, and the professionalism of that linguistic input, the whole CJEU would grind to a halt immediately. To put it another way: in the Golden Towers of Babel, without language, law would not happen. This is an abridged version of the Threlford Memorial Lecture, delivered under the title 'Language, Law and the (Golden) Towers of Babel'. For the full version, see the News section at www.ciol.org.uk (13/10/14). PASSING JUDGEMENT A Court of Justice reading room G FEssY © CJUE