Levasseur, Legal Linguist

• Author: John Randall Trahan
• Position: Louis B. Porterie Professor of Law and Saul Litvinoff Distinguished Professor of Law, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University.
• Pages: 1025-1061

Levasseur, Legal Linguist

John Randall Trahan*

Introduction ................................................................................ 1025

I. The Backdrop of the Approach: Law and Language .................. 1029

II. Presentation of the Approach ..................................................... 1031

A. Legal Translation: What Is It?.............................................. 1032

B. The Ends of Legal Translation ............................................. 1033

1. The End in General ........................................................ 1033

2. More Particular Ends ..................................................... 1034

a. Facilitating Legal Research ..................................... 1034

b. Contributing Positively to the Ongoing

Development of “The Civil Law in English” .......... 1036

C. The Means of Legal Translation .......................................... 1038

1. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel ............................................. 1038

2. Use “Legal” Cognates and Even “Common

Language”Cognates in the Target Language, Provided

They Are Closely Related in Meaning to the Terms

of the Source Language ................................................. 1041

3. Look Out for “False Friends” ........................................ 1043

4. Use Equivalents, Especially “Rough Equivalents,”

with Extreme Caution .................................................... 1046

a. “Violence” as “Duress” ........................................... 1048

b. “Solidaire” as “Joint and Several” .......................... 1050

III. Critical Evaluation ...................................................................... 1055

Conclusion .................................................................................. 1060

INTRODUCTION

Some, including Professor Levasseur himself, might object to the title

of this Essay because, one might argue, this title is potentially misleading.

The expression “linguist” is today often reserved for someone who, by dent

of specialized academic training, either studies languages scientifically and

writes about them as a scholar or serves as a professional translator from one

Copyright 2016, by JOHN RANDALL TRAHAN.

* Louis B. Porterie Professor of Law and Saul Litvinoff Distinguished

Professor of Law, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University.

1026 LOUISIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 76

language into another. Professor Levasseur, as he himself is happy to

acknowledge, has received no such training. Though he is a scholar, and

at least in some sense—the sense of “legal science,” as understood in the

civil law tradition—a “scientist,” most of his scholarship has been

concentrated in the fields of legal history, legal methodology, civil law,

and comparative law. He does not now, nor has he ever, earned his living

by translating for “hire.”

Still, I think the title is entirely appropriate. To begin with, the

expression “linguist” carries a second and more expansive denotation,

namely, one who is “master of tongues other than his own.”1 Professor

Levasseur certainly fits this description. The son of a French consular

officer, he grew up speaking French at home, of course, but was also

exposed to other languages as his father was stationed here and there,

including Spain and Brazil. During grade school in France, he studied not

only English, but also Spanish, becoming quite fluent in the latter thanks

in large part to the assistance of his Hispanophone mother. Upon his

graduation from law school, he spent six months at the City of London

College, where he first immersed himself in English. The following year,

he came to the United States as a graduate student in law. From then until

now, English has served as his primary professional language, though he

has continued to work in French as well. He is, then, certainly a “linguist”

in the broad sense of “master of other tongues.” But even if one were to

stick with the narrower denotation of “linguist” noted above, one could

still defend the title. Though most of his scholarship has been devoted to

other topics, he has still written a number of scholarly articles on the topic

of law and language, with a particular emphasis on legal translation. This

still-growing corpus of work, which now numbers five pieces, includes

ones entitled “Discourse on Our Method”2 and “Our Approach to

Translation.”3 The citations included in these works show that he has

1. 8 THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 992 (2d ed. 1992) (definition 1).

2. This “Discourse” forms the introductory section of Alain Levasseur &

David Gruning, Version Louisianaise, in L’ART DE LA TR ADUCTION, L’ACCUEIL

INTERNATIO NAL DE L’AVANT -PROJET DE RÉFORME DU DROIT DES OBLIGATIONS

33–35 (Pierre Catala ed., 2011) [hereinafter L’art de la Traduction].

3. Alain A. Levasseur & J. Randall Trahan, Our Approach to Translation,

in GÉRARD CORNU, DICTIONARY OF THE CIVIL CODE xiv (Alain Levasseur et al.

trans., 2015) [hereinafter Approach]. Professor Levasseur’s other three works on

legal translation are: Alain A. Levasseur, Les Maux des Mots en Droit Comparé:

L’avant-projet de Réforme du Droit des Obligations en Anglais, 2008 REVUE

INTERNATIONALE DE DROIT COMPARÉ [R.I.D.C.] 819 [hereinafter Maux des

Mots]; Alain A. Levasseur, Réflexions Introductives, 68 LANGUES ET PROCÈS 9,

68 (2015) [hereinafter Réflexions]; Alain A. Levasseur, Ruminations Around the

2016] LEVASSEUR, LEGAL LINGUIST 1027

studied most if not all of the pertinent literature—the most prominent

works on legal translation, both in French and in English. In addition,

either on his own or in collaboration with others, he has now produced

translations of at least four books from French into English, including

Christian Atias’ Le Droit Civil and more recently Gerard Cornu’s

Vocabulaire Juridique.4 Professor Levasseur has also produced

translations of at least four legislative documents from French into

English, including the French Constitution of 1958, the French Civil Code,

and most recently the pending “Avant-Projet of the Reform of the Law of

Obligations” of France. In the end, then, his only “deficiency” (if that is

even the right word) as a linguist in the narrow sense is his lack of formal

training in linguistics. But what some people lack in the way of formal

training, they often make up through experience. When it comes to

linguistics, Professor Levasseur, thanks to his abundant experience, is just

such a person.

My aim in this Essay is to provide an exposé of the approach

Professeur Levasseur has taken in his work as a “legal linguist”—to be

more precise, his method of legal translation. The exposé begins by

examining, if only briefly, what one might call the “backdrop” against

which he has developed that method—his understanding of the

relationship between “legal language,” on the one hand, and “legal

culture,” on the other. Having done that, the exposé examines, in this

order, Professor Levasseur’s understanding of what legal translation is,

what its proper ends are, and what means should be used to attain those

ends. Finally, the exposé presents a brief critical valuation of his method.

Before proceeding, I should point out several difficulties facing me

that complicate the task to which I’ve set my hand. The first is that, in all

of the scholarship on legal translation that Professor Levasseur has so far

produced, none of it contains a comprehensive and systematic presentation

of his method. In the place of such a work, one instead finds several works

that amount to “defenses” of the approach to or the method of translation

that he and his collaborators adopted in undertaking the translation of this

or that particular text. The most notable of these defenses are his works on

the first avant-projet of the reform of the French law of obligations (the

so-called Avant-Projet Catala) and on the Vocabulaire Juridique. Further,

all of these works concern the translation of texts that involve one and the

same body of law—the French civil law—written in one and the same

Dictionary of the Civil Code, 9 J. CIV. L. STUD. (forthcoming 2016) (manuscript

on file with Author) [hereinafter Ruminations].

4. GÉRARD CORNU, DICTIONARY OF THE CIVIL CODE (Alain Levasseur et al.

trans., 2015) [hereinafter DICTIONARY OF THE CIVIL CODE ]. The Vocabulaire

Juridique might be thought of as France’s answer to Black’s Law Dictionary.