“Inter-lingual uncertainty” is a term first used by Deborah Cao to refer to the “uncertainty [that] arises when two languages are considered or when one language is translated into another language.” ("Inter-lingual uncertainty in bilingual and multilingual law", Cao 2007a: 71). After Cao’s essay focussing on bilingual and multilingual law, very few studies on the topic have appeared. This study aims to provide a contribution to the field by studying the uncertainty arising from a monolingual law such as that of China when its terminology is interpreted against Italian. It exemplifies the uncertainty of the use of two key-terms such as weituo (委托) and daili (代理) and their components, such as weituo daili ren (委托代理人), of the Chinese law of agency with respect to the Italian legal-linguistic context. My study shows that the Chinese legal terms might be more semantically obscure than their Italian ‘equivalents’. It proposes that the intralingual uncertainty of the source language is further enhanced by the requisites of perspicuity of the target language. It argues that when linguistic uncertainty is not intentional and the target language is less uncertain than the source language, it has to be resolved in cross-lingual interpretation.
Vagueness in legal language: a contrastive analysis of the Chinese and Italian legal terms of agency law
Mannoni
2021-01-01
Abstract
“Inter-lingual uncertainty” is a term first used by Deborah Cao to refer to the “uncertainty [that] arises when two languages are considered or when one language is translated into another language.” ("Inter-lingual uncertainty in bilingual and multilingual law", Cao 2007a: 71). After Cao’s essay focussing on bilingual and multilingual law, very few studies on the topic have appeared. This study aims to provide a contribution to the field by studying the uncertainty arising from a monolingual law such as that of China when its terminology is interpreted against Italian. It exemplifies the uncertainty of the use of two key-terms such as weituo (委托) and daili (代理) and their components, such as weituo daili ren (委托代理人), of the Chinese law of agency with respect to the Italian legal-linguistic context. My study shows that the Chinese legal terms might be more semantically obscure than their Italian ‘equivalents’. It proposes that the intralingual uncertainty of the source language is further enhanced by the requisites of perspicuity of the target language. It argues that when linguistic uncertainty is not intentional and the target language is less uncertain than the source language, it has to be resolved in cross-lingual interpretation.
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