Multilingualism, Legal Drafting and Interpretation of Bilingual Law in Italy

The article begins with a short history of the current Italian language, as an example of a dialect evolving and becoming elevated to the status of a national language. Next, an overview of Italy as characterized by multilingualism and of the different minority languages is offered. A third part is devoted to the different legal languages of Italian law and particularly to the consequences of multilingualism in Italy, which refers to the obligation to draft some local laws in two or tree languages. Multilingual drafting concerns institutions – and therefore concepts – of Italian law which are applied within one single legal system, namely the Italian one, and are merely expressed in a legal language which is not only Italian, but German, French or Ladin. This part is discussed more in deep. The article underlines that legal multilingualism in Italy is a rather unexplored research field. As in Europe there is a clear need for studies inquiring the problem of intepretation and application of mulitlingual law, the praxis and the operative reality of the “regional” legal languages in Italy would probably deserve more attention.

Market, Management and Profession. Social Business in the Polder

In a recent policy document of the organized employers in the care and welfare sector in The Netherlands (the MO Group), directors and board members of care and welfare institutions present themselves as "social entrepreneurs", managing their institutions as look-a like commercial companies. They are hardly criticized and there is not any countervailing power of significance. The workers are focusing on their own specialized professional fields and divided as a whole. Many government officials are in favour or do not bother. The relatively small number of intellectual workers in Dutch care and welfare are fragmented and pragmatic. From a democratic point of view this is a worrying situation. From a professional point of view the purpose and functions of professional care and welfare work are at stake. The penetration of market mechanisms and the take-over by commercially orientated managers result from unquestioned adaptation of Anglo-Saxon policy in The Netherlands in the 1990's, following the crisis of the Welfare State in the late 1980's. The polder country is now confronted fully with the pressure and negative effects of unbalanced powers in the institutions, i.e. Managerialism. After years of silence, the two principal authentic critics of Dutch care and welfare, Harry Kunneman and Andries Baart, are no longer voices crying in the wilderness, but are getting a response from a growing number of worried workers and intellectuals. Kunneman and Baart warn against the restriction of professional space and the loss of normative values and standards in the profession. They are right. It is high time to make room for criticism and to start a debate about the future of the social professions in The Netherlands, better: in Europe. Research, discussion and action have to prove how worrying the everyday situation of professional workers is, what goals have to be set and what strategy to be chosen.

Legal Translation and the Bilingual Publication of Roman Imperial Constitutions

The present paper aims at investigating translation techniques and publication methods of Roman imperial constitutions published in Greek in the eastern provinces of the empire, where the official Latin was not well-established. Language, being a tool for normative communication must be comprehensible to the addressees of the norm, therefore publication of a normative text in a multilingual society brings along difficulties related in particular to the translatability of legal terminology. Language problems appear, however, not only in the level of communication, but also in those of implementation and interpretation of norms. Linguistic diversity, which currently afflicts legislators in the EU, has already been a challenge for the legislators in the Roman Empire. Major difficulty was the necessity of expressing Roman legal concepts in Greek language. Centralized translation system and consequent use of terminology helped to adapt Greek for the purposes of Roman legislator creating new technical vocabulary.