ABSTRACT
This chapter asks how a legal translator should approach the translation of authoritative legal texts for the purpose of subsequent comparative legal research. Comparative legal research may serve many purposes, one of which is to gain knowledge of a foreign legal system and to inform a domestic audience about it (Sacco 1991: 4; Zweigert and Kötz 1996: 15; Gordley 1995: 566–67; Curran 2002: 47; Samuel 2003: 15). Authoritative legal texts, such as statutes and judicial decisions, will probably be amongst the primary sources of information in most comparative legal research. This is the case if the comparatist chooses to compare the abstract content of formal legal rules (Schulte-Nölke, Twigg-Flesner and Ebers 2008), but also when focusing on extra-legal elements in the foreign society or culture that may affect judicial decision-making in that legal system (Van Hoecke 2002: 7; Gerber 1998: 720–24; Frankenberg 1985: 421). After all, even the US legal realist Karl Llewellyn writes that ascertaining what ‘officials are going to […] do about disputes’, will involve a study of the ‘so-called rules of law which judges say they are bound by, which judges say they have to apply’ (1960: 6–7; original emphasis).
