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 TRADUCTION, L’ACCUEIL INTERNATIONAL 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. 1028 LOUISIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 76 source language—French—into one and the same target language— English. Providing the reader with a view of Professor Levasseur’s “method in general” will therefore require that I make some abstractions and extrapolations from these particular works. A second difficulty that I face is that the works in question are in large part polemical, that is, directed against other translators who have taken a different and, in Professor Levasseur’s judgment, problematic approach to legal translation. The writing in those works, then, includes a good bit of rhetoric, and at points perhaps even hyperbole. When this fact is added to that of the “occasionalness” of the works, it becomes clear that Professor Levasseur, in his writing on legal translation, has been more Martin Luther than John Calvin. The task of exposing the underlying method is accordingly made that much more difficult. A third difficulty is that most of Professor Levasseur’s works on the topic of legal translation, including the most comprehensive— Les Maux des Mots —were written in French, not in English. To the extent that I wish to include quotations of those works in my exposé—and I will, with a vengeance—I must then not only explain but also translate. The fourth and final difficulty that I face arises not from Professor Levasseur or his work, but rather from me. Though he can claim the title of legal linguist in the narrow sense, I cannot. With one exception that I will mention shortly, I have never—at least not before writing this Essay— written on the topic of legal translation. Nor have I, for that...