I was going to post this on Adam Shell’s blog in response to his post Parlez-vous anglais ? Sprechen Sie Englisch? Вы говорите английскую язык? Μιλάτε τα αγγλικά; (it’s about the limitations of legal rule systems that are created in english for use in non-english speaking contexts – go read it – I’ll still be here when you get back. No really, go) If you click on the link to try and post a response, you’re whisked off to some magical 400 Bad Request Error land – same goes for when you click on the link to his post (the full title) that I’ve included above – I’m guessing this is caused by Adam’s use of non-english characters in his title not playing nicely with the html code generated for the link by WordPress.
This is a good example of a difficulty that may be experienced in trying to port an expert legal system to another language, which leads me to the point I was going to make on Adam’s blog; In Canada, by virtue of our two official languages, we are faced with a situation whereby legislation is created in both english and french, neither one is viewed as paramount over the other, and each is to be interpreted in light of the other. We call this the equal authenticity rule (by we I mean me and Supreme Court Justice Basterache) and it means that any expert legal system would need to account for both the english and french meanings of legislation and how they alter each other’s prima facie meaning. If you don’t speak more than one language it may not be immediately apparent that it is impossible to create a document in two languages that is literally the same. Some words exist in one language that simply do not in another. (a simple example of this is the french version of the word goodbye, ‘au revoir’, does not mean goodbye, it means literally ‘to re-see’ kind of a french ‘until we meet again’) In this light, it seems that it would be quite difficult to implement an expert legal system that is bilingual and deals with two versions of a single piece of legislation. An expert legal system niche feature that would be pretty useful in this context, however, might be one that identified incongruencies between the two versions of legislation relating to any case you’re working on.
Thats fascinating stuff Graham! Statutory interpretation of legislation in one language in one country is enough, but TWO languages for which legislation is needed would be a headache! Then extending the sorts of semantic difficulties one can have in translating source data into a legal inferencing system would probably mean you would need to have two systems – but then one would have to ensure the equivalent inputs, would lead to the same outputs. But then i know when translating words from different languages, sometimes there is no perfect translation. Thanks for the interesting insight into Canada!
Comment by sachinsuch — October 28, 2006 @ 7:46 pm
Does this only emerge as a problem for judicially untested legislation? Surely once a judgment is made concerning a piece of legislation there is an authoritative meaning presribed that is capable of transcending language boundaries.
My only experience outside of English consists of a few fumbling attempts at Spanish so I’m probably missing the finer points, but it seemed to me that concepts and ideas translated well even where specific words may not have.
Comment by alexrb — October 29, 2006 @ 1:29 pm