51吃瓜网

On June 20, 2025, the Paul-Andr茅 Cr茅peau Centre for Private and Comparative Law and the Network of Jurilinguistic Centres held the 19th Institute of Jurilinguistics at 51吃瓜网鈥檚 Faculty of Law.

The event addressed the comparative dimension of jurilinguistics regarding both the substance of legal texts and their drafting style. While comparative law provides models for drafters, translators, and jurilinguists to draw upon, this requires that each text be considered within its legal, historical, political, and social context. Comparative legislative drafting also reveals the diversity of styles and conventions even within a single legal tradition or a single country.

The first panel focused on the possibilities and limits of comparative law. Professor Eva Ottawa first presented her research on the construction of a legal lexicon in Atikamekw Nehiromowin. This work, carried out with Elders from the community, involves identifying the meaning, teaching, and use of the lexicon鈥檚 terms, and then examining their etymology. Four themes are addressed: childhood and family, social organization and governance, justice and conflict management, and mental and territorial health. The aim of such a project is to revitalize the Atikamekw Nehiromowin legal tradition while making it more accessible to non-Indigenous jurists. Next, Professor Helge Dedek highlighted the colonial past of the discipline of comparative law in the West. The comparative method and the ideology of progress it promotes underwent severe criticism in several disciplines, but such critiques have been slow to emerge in law. According to Professor Dedek, Professor Ottawa鈥檚 work is remarkable. In her book on customary adoption among the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok of Manawan, the researcher explains that she had to 鈥渄ecolonize her mind鈥� before it was possible to account for the legal order under study without applying the comparative method.

In the first pair of workshops that followed this panel, jurist and Translation Bureau translator Francie Gow used tree and tuning fork metaphors to explain legal translation in multilingual jurisdictions. Law resembles a branching tree made of words, while official bilingual legal instruments are symmetrical branches resembling tuning forks that provide authoritative equivalents. However, she emphasized that foreign models become relevant as inspiration when translating concepts lacking equivalent development in the target language鈥攁reas where no tuning forks yet exist, requiring the creation of new mirror branches. For her part, Meaghan Daniel, lawyer in Ontario and lecturer at 51吃瓜网, showed how the use of English (or French) terms to designate Indigenous realities reflects the worldview from which they arise. For example, the notion of 鈥渞esource鈥� to describe the loss of a hunting, gathering, or fishing right reduces that loss to its economic dimension. Similarly, the requirement of a boundary to delimit a traditional territory is incompatible with a relationship to land that does not recognize borders.

The second panel examined the use of external norms in drafting or interpreting laws. Professor Alexandre Fl眉ckiger focused on the integration of such norms in legislative drafting. Instruments of self-regulation (such as ISO standards) and instruments of co-regulation (the result of cooperation between the State and private actors) are sometimes incorporated into positive law through incorporation or delegation. Such norms are not always readily accessible and are sometimes not translated. In the interpretation of legislative texts, Professor M茅lanie Samson stressed the importance of considering the context in which the texts were adopted. This is why the use of international or comparative law to support the interpretation of domestic law is not without difficulty. To avoid arbitrary or selective reliance on external norms, one must proceed with rigor and justify their use in legal analysis.

During the second pair of workshops, Associate Professor Corina Veleanu presented a comparative analysis of certain legal neologisms in Romance languages, highlighting their emergence under various cultural and linguistic influences. Terms such as whistleblower and feminicide circulate between languages, while taking on different forms and meanings. Translation must therefore remain attentive to the differences in perception associated with seemingly identical terms, depending on the contexts in which they are used. Meanwhile, Me France Allard, Me Kayley Laura Lata, and law student Charlotte Ruffo addressed the difficulty of referencing Indigenous legal traditions within the formal frameworks of civil law or common law. Their reflection emerged from their work on the : Persons. In particular, the attempt to define 鈥淚ndigenous customary adoption鈥� reveals the limits of what a civil law dictionary can achieve, the risk of essentialization, and the problem of legitimacy when a definition is formulated by non-Indigenous jurists.

Finally, the closing lecture, delivered by Betty Cohen, president of the Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interpr猫tes agr茅茅s du Qu茅bec, served as a prelude to the 20th Institute of Jurilinguistics to be held in June 2026 on the theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to Betty Cohen, AI is not a threat to translators, particularly in a field as sensitive as law. Rather, it is a tool to be mastered and developed using a high-quality corpus. Indeed, the day鈥檚 conferences demonstrated that legal translation is fundamentally a matter of sensitivity and judgment.

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Further reading:

Waseskinokwe Eva Ottawa, Wactenamakanicic e opikihakaniwitc : l鈥檃doption coutumi猫re chez les Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok de Manawan, Qu茅bec, Presses de l鈥橴niversit茅 Laval, 2023

Helge Dedek, 鈥淭he Tradition of Comparative Law: Comparison and Its Colonial Legacies鈥�, dans The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024, p 387-407

Corina Veleanu, 芦 La n茅ologie juridique : quelques observations en jurilinguistique contrastive 禄 2018:12 Neologica 203 脿 la p 218 and 芦 L鈥檌nvisibilisation dans la traduction juridique : l鈥檈xemple du domaine des minorit茅s 禄, Le droit e(s)t la langue. Approches contemporaines des sp茅cificit茅s culturelles et juridiques par le lexique et la traduction, Rep猫res-Dorif 32/2025, Chiara PREITE, Daniela DINC膫, Gloria ZANELLA (茅ds.), .

Meaghan Daniel, 鈥淒ecolonizing law. To learn Indigenous law, first, forget everything you learned in law school鈥�, National Magazine, 2019, .

Alexandre Fl眉ckiger, (Re)faire la loi : trait茅 de la l茅gistique 脿 l鈥櫭╮e du droit souple, Berne, St盲mplfi, 2019

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The Cr茅peau Centre wishes to thank the and the for their financial support.