What Shall We Do with Legal Concepts? A Euro-English-Romanian Perspective
What Shall We Do with Legal Concepts? A Euro-English-Romanian Perspective

Summary/Abstract: Comprehensive studies dedicated to legal conceptualism seem to have been, for whatever reason, to a lesser degree the pet subject of the legal scientific field. One might argue that, owing to the fact that the "concept-theme" is as elusive and volatile as the "law-theme" itself, one could be inclined to approach the former with circumspection. Nonetheless, debates revolving around (legal) concepts, their relation to legal language and their role and function in law are highly topical due to the fact that the issue of conceptualism, i.e. concept formation, change and evolution is an intrinsic part of the process of law creation at the level of the European Union. EU law is a living mechanism; it undergoes constant changes and is being continuously fed into with 24 equally authentic language versions and 552 language combinations of legislation proposed and adopted. Against this background, terminological disarray is bound to exist and even persist. But, is there such a thing as conceptual disarray or incongruity allowed in multilingual law? How does language accommodate (difficult) legal concepts? The present article discusses some of the difficulties that translators and lawyer-linguists working at EU institutions come across in the process of translating legal texts. It engages first in a theoretical debate about legal conceptualism and gradually brings readers closer to some of the practical intricacies associated with the translation of law within the framework of the European Union.

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