Legal translators and legal translation

Since I am a lawyer, let me start with a disclaimer: nothing I shall say is intended to reflect the views of my employers past or present or any professional association to which I may belong. And please don’t write any letters — unless they are addressed to me. The reason I start in this fashion is that some years ago, when I had just become a notary, I gave an interview to a charming lady from a careers magazine for schools and somehow allowed her to obtain the impression that all notaries in the United Kingdom earned vast amounts of money. Notaries in, for example, Italy, may earn fortunes but that is not usually the case in the UK. The result was that all the firms of notaries in London (London being the only place in the UK where firms of notaries as such are to be found) were flooded with letters from schoolboys (and their daddies) seeking to become articled clerks. And, by way of punishment, I was given the task of answering them all. I am a notary. I now work at the Court of Justice of the European Communities in Luxembourg as a translator and reviser — or, to use the description used by the Court, a lawyer-linguist. I believe that in the early days the term used was ‘jurist-linguist’, being a translation of the French juriste-linguiste, but the word ‘jurist’ sounds pompous when used otherwise than to describe an eminent lawyer with many years’ experience and great renown, so the term ‘lawyer-linguist’ was adopted. There are legal translators of course in the United Nations, and more particularly at the International Court of Justice at The Hague (where they are known as ‘legal secretaries’ because they are actually involved in the administration of the judicial process and as well as translating they interpret), at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, in government offices throughout the