Out of the Fly-Bottle: Conceptual Confusions in Multilingual Legislation
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Out of the Fly-Bottle: Conceptual Confusions in Multilingual Legislation King Kui Sin
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract Conceptual confusions permeate all forms of intellectual pursuit. Many have contended that multilingual legislation, i.e., one law enacted in different languages, is unviable when carried out by means of translation. But not many have realized that the same would also be true of drafting if their contention could be justified. My involvement in the translation of Hong Kong laws into Chinese in the run-up to 1997 exposed me to a whole world of myths and misconceptions about legal translation arising from our failure to command a clear view of the workings of language. Over the years I have endeavoured to come to grips with the problems inherent in legal translation, showing that the arguments against the possibility of exact translation, against the possibility of achieving equivalence between different language texts of the law, and against the possibility of bridging the conceptual gap between legal terminologies in different languages, are all ill-grounded and misguided. There are indeed enormous difficulties in drafting and translating multilingual law, but they are essentially of a technical nature, by no means theoretically irresolvable. The viability of multilingual legislation is simply grounded in our innate communicative intention to use signs and symbols to convey meaning. As language users, we are capable of making language work for us for any particular purpose. Just as we can translate the rules of chess from one language to another whereby players speaking different languages can play the same game called “chess”, we don’t see why we can’t do the same with multilingual legislation. The door has always been open! Keywords Conceptual confusion · Multilingual legislation · Speech act · Equal authenticity · Equivalence
K. K. Sin (&) City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]
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K. K. Sin
1 Trapped in Our Conceptual Fly-Bottles Wittgenstein has a hilarious description of a person caught in a conceptual confusion, likening him to someone [I]n a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how. He tries the window but it is too high. He tries the chimney but it is too narrow. And if he would only turn around, he would see that the door has been open all the time!1 Wittgenstein also portrays such person as a fly trapped in a fly-bottle and sees it as his aim in philosophy “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”.2 For much too long multilingual legislation has been fraught with conceptual confusions arising from our failure to command a clear view of the workings of language. We have been trapped in concepts of our own making, unable to free ourselves from the seemingly insurmountable difficulties in multilingual legislation. We have failed to see that multilingual legislation, for all its technicalities and complexities at the operational level, is grounded in a simple intentional act we perform to fulfill a real need
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