Legal terms: Italian to English free online dictionary

[alpha male]

A friend is translating an Italian legal document
to English for his parents and he asked me to
find a free online legal dictionary or glossary
of terms from Italian to English.

Googling, I found items like this:
- Guide to Italian Legal Research and Resources on the Web
http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/Italy.htm

But none of the listed resources passed even the first
test, which wasthe translation for the word "Statuto".

Offhand, do you know of a decent online source for an
Italian-to-English legal terms translation site?

[deadrat]

This sounds like a very bad idea. What do you suppose
"malizia reale" means in Italian?

You don't say what languages your friend speaks or the
subject matter of the Italian document, but his parents
might need a bilingual translator, at ease in the idiom
of two languages and versed in the legal systems of two
countries. I'd doubt that on-line lexicons are going to
do the job. Your friend might end up like the apocryphal
Russian-English translation program that took in "Out of
sight, out of mind" in English and gave back the Russian
for "blind idiot."

[alpha male]

deadrat wrote:
> You don't say what languages your friend speaks or
> the subject matter of the Italian document, but his
> parents might need a bilingual translator

Mea culpa. I was remiss in not explaining the starting point.

My friend, having been raised in Italy, is fluent in both
languages.

The problem is only the lack of technical knowledge of
American English legal terms.

Therefore, a standard (if it exists) Italian-English online
legal glossary would work - were I to locate one.

[micky]

alpha male <alph...@nowherenohow.com> wrote:
> My friend, having been raised in Italy, is fluent
> in both languages.
>
> The problem is only the lack of technical knowledge
> of American English legal terms.
>
> Therefore, a standard (if it exists) Italian-English

> onlinelegal glossary would work - were I to locate one.

When I got back from 4 or 5 months in Mexico and Central
America, I spoke Spanish well and read almost as fast as
in English. (Understanding speech was much harder.)

A lawyer friend offered me a contract translating a
farily short contract (or other legal document?) from
English to Spanish, and he also lent me a 2- or 3-inch
thick Spanish-English-Spanish dictionary. It was not
especially legal, just a regular dictionary, But I was
impressed that it had an entry for "jointly and severally
liable", iirc one Spanish word that meant all that.

I can't compare how technical that document was with
yours, but translation went very quickly for me, and
afaik I did a good job. Never heard otherwise.

Half-way through the project, my lawyer friend said
something which after a few days I figured out was a
request for a kick-back. I told him I couldn't do
that, and I'd be glad to stop working on it and not
charge any money, but he let me finish and paid the
agreed upon price. He worked for a law firm. I'm
pretty stupid because it took me 12 more years to
dump him as a friend. Maybe I didn't count this
incident because I hadn't given him any money, but I
finally couldn't take his snarkiness. No other lawyer
or non-lawyer I know has come close.)

Maybe your friend should just make a list of technical
words and try an unabridged or at least large
Italian-English dictionary, or even google translate.
(OK, I just tried that for "jointly and severally
liable" and it gave 4 words, not one.) or some other
translate page (at least for words if not phrases).

I didn't see anything purporting to be an Italian-English
dictionary in the URL you first gave.

[Dave M.]

Alpha,

I don't follow you. If your friend is fluent in both
languages then he can use legal dictionaries in both
languages to look up the terms that he needs. He
should be able to supply a translation after he has
read the definition if he understands the context.

I'd think that an Italian-English Legal Dictionary
would be inferior to a good translator.

Good luck,
Dave M.

[Mike Jacobs]

alpha male <alpham...@nowherenohow.com> wrote:

> My friend, having been raised in Italy, is fluent in both
> languages.

Is your friend an Italian lawyer, or at least somewhat familiar with
the Italian legal system and its terminology, beyond what a typical
Italian person would have? Say, a legal-secretarial level of
knowledge of terminology? I assume he is not a US lawyer, because you
go on to say:

> The problem is only the lack of technical knowledge of
> American English legal terms.

That's not the _only_ problem. Concepts never translate exactly from
one language to another. Although concepts may overlap for most
purposes, there are always nuances on both sides that do not overlap.
Portions of the meaning get "lost in translation." Unfortunately,
the law does not only deal with the big, indisputably similar hunks of
meaning in the middle which both languages' concepts share. Law
deals with nuances and ramifications of hopefully-precise terminology,
all the way to the very edges of a word's intended meaning, to either
(A) resolve rarely-encountered situations after disputes _do_ arise
over some factual happening, or (B) set forth in advance what _should_
happen in anticipation of a variety of "what-if" situations. Getting
it "almost" spot-on right is not good enough when dealing with
translation of legal documents.

That problem of linguistic non-overlap would exist in translating from
one language to another even if the two countries' legal systems were
largely simiilar. But here, they are not. USA law (federal and
state) arises from the English "common law" tradition of mostly judge-
made law based on written judicial opinions that are published and
reported as case precedent, supplemented more and more in recent years
by statutory law which still relies upon judicial precedent to define
its scope and meaning, Italian law, by contrast, arises from the
"civil law" tradition that holds sway over most of continental Europe
and Latin America, which is based on the Napoleonic Code and the even
older Justinian Code on which Napoleon's version was based. The civil
law code was considered a complete statutory codification of ancient
Roman law, covering everything.

The two concepts -- common law and civil law -- are polar opposites in
the way the judicial process in each type of jurisdiction goes about
making decisions, as well as in the origin and meaning of the most
fundamental concepts of both systems (say, for instance, their
concepts of tort duty, of what a contract is, of what property means)
which started from different beginnings and still have significant
differences.

Thus, you have _two_ kinds of translation error to deal with. I hope
you can see that the merely linguistic problems of legal translation
are relatively trivial compared to the much more fundamental problem
of accurately translating concepts from one legal system into an
entirely unrelated legal system. For instance, it would be much
easier to translate your Italian legal documents into French, or
Spanish, or even German, for that matter, not because French, Spanish
and Italian are all Romance languages derived from Latin, but because
those countries all use the civil-law code system of law. German and
English are more closely related linguistically, but the legal-
translation problem would still be almost as difficult since you would
be trying to render German civil-law legal concepts into English
common-law terms.

> Therefore, a standard (if it exists) Italian-English online
> legal glossary would work - were I to locate one.

I'm going to suggest that the only source of information you might
find at all useful and reliable would be the translation services of a
single live person who is fluent in both languages, AND who has legal
training in both jurisdictions -- again, not necessarily a practicing
lawyer admitted in both jurisdictions, but at least someone with legal
or legal-secretarial training specific to both jurisdictions so that
he is familiar with each language's legal jargon, and has a sense of
the degree to which similar terms overlap or do not overlap depending
on the context. No "expert program" I know of is yet sensitive
enough to pick up on all such nuances of meaning. But, there are
such people, many of them professionals engaged in exactly the kind of
legal translation you are asking about. If a genuine legal matter is
at stake, find one and hire him to do the job. If not, and if your
friend is just doing this "for fun," your friend's "close enough"
rough translation ought to be sufficient to merely satisfy his
parents' idle curiosity.
--
This posting is for discussion purposes, not professional advice.
Anything you post on this Newsgroup is public information.
I am not your lawyer, and you are not my client in any specific legal
matter.
For confidential professional advice, consult your own lawyer in a
private communication.
Mike Jacobs
LAW OFFICE OF W. MICHAEL JACOBS
10440 Little Patuxent Pkwy #300
Columbia, MD 21044
(tel) 410-740-5685

[alpha male]

Mike Jacobs wrote:
> No "expert program" I know of is yet sensitive
> enough to pick up on all such nuances of meaning.

My friend his helping translate an Italian
non-profit-style web site into English to get the
word around of all the good things they do.

They have a section on legal issues in Italy that
are harder to translate than all the other sections.

Sure, the friend (who is fluent in both Italian
and in English) 'could' translate roughly - but
the fluency in English is speaking fluency. It's
not legal fluency.

It's looking more and more like what we need
doesn't exist ... so we'll have to wing it. I
was hoping there existed a decent glossary but
if it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist. Nothing
more can be done about that.

Thanks everyone for the great advice!