ABSTRACT
If we return to Christiane Nord's distinction between documental and instrumental types of translation, we find that official translation would be included among the documental type, since “the target text, in this case, is a text about a text, or about one or more particular aspects of a text” (Nord 1997:47). To understand this, we need to recall that, even in cases in which the translated text is valued as an original, there always remains the need to allow the translated text to be compared to its original. The search for fidelity to the original is a need felt by the recipients of the translations (judges, administrators). It must thus be possible to compare this kind of translation to its original. Fidelity here is not easy to explain, as the hermeneutics of legal texts remain something of a mystery — a mixture of words (documents: the only material substance) and opinions (depending on the interests of the parties or the interpretation of different judges, often hidden or vague intentions and debatable rules of interpretation). If in literary translation the need to compare to the original implies fidelity to the author's words and intentions, in official translation this need derives from an imprecise, undefined fidelity to words, meanings and intentions, according to the set of rules for interpretation which constitute the law.
