Hans-Heinrkh Vogel, Juridiska översättningar

This book would certainly become a standard work for the theory and practice of legal translation if it had been written in a more internationally accessible language than Swedish. In this review, the book's main ideas are presented more extensively than would otherwise be necessary so that those readers who do not have a good command of Swedish can form an idea of the work's merits.The book treats, with great competence, the following problems: Linguistic and legal problems connected to international agreements that exist in different authentic versions or in a language that is not that of the parties who are making the agreement; quality control of legal translations, especialy those in Sweden; the translation of general language vocabulary that is found in legal texts; the question of equivalence relationships in the translation of legal terms; the translation of culturally bound vocabulary; translation of names of different courts, authorities and organizations; problems in the translation of designations for different crimes as well as for legal terms with ideological connotations; linguistic limitations within any given language due to incongruities in certain terms that are used not only within the context of national law but also within international law.The book's theoretical commentaries are characterized by balance and are accompanied by a great deal of useful advice for solving practical problems of translation. This reviewer would like to see better bilingual dictionaries that are based on complete and thorough comparative analyses of legal systems and that are of the same type as that which Vogel has carried out using only a limited number of examples.