ABSTRACT
There are many incentives for technical communicators to think about legal issues in multilingual projects. Because many importing countries (e.g., countries of the European Union and Russia) require user documentation to be translated into their official languages, and there is a significant growth in U.S. exports,1 the volume and costs of technical translations are rising. At the same time, since consumer protection and translation laws are becoming better defined and more stringent (e.g., EU Resolution C411), substandard translations are increasingly likely to cause liability danger and become a source of litigation. Even more importantly, international businesses have a legal and ethical duty to make their products safe for the consumers. These businesses need to devote resources to making product information adequate for international consumers. They must do so to protect themselves from liability litigation, to encourage import/export, and to meet “ethical standards of utility, rights, justice, and care” (Markel, 2001, as cited in Lipus, 2006, p. 76). In this chapter, I look at legal issues in multilingual technical communication projects. I argue that the concept of legal literacy that emphasizes the civic engagement of technical communicators and critical rethinking of legal contexts is very useful for discussing the legal issues of international technical com - munication and needs to include these issues. I start by reviewing how the focus of discussions of legal issues in technical communication has been changing over the last 30 years. I then point out that two of the newest direc tions-seeing technical communicators as co-producers of law and including global contexts
into the discussion of legal issues-have a great deal in common. I then use an adapted framework of two core acts of legal literacy in technical communica - tion outlined by Hannah (2011) to summarize issues of international technical communication. In so doing, I discuss the contributions that technical com - municators, translators, and law authors can make to the idea of legal literacy in global contexts. Through this discussion, I elucidate what legal literacy for multilingual technical communication projects entails, and I outline possible directions for future research.
