Conference
"Approaching the Multilanguage Complexity of European Law: Methodologies in Comparison"

European University Institute, Fiesole (Italy)
17 November 2006

Traditionally, comparative law has had many contacts and interactions with legal translation, given that the two disciplines share many common problems, such as in particular the need to consider different legal systems, which express rules and doctrines in different languages. 

This workshop aims at promoting the exchange of ideas between comparative law and legal translation, an exchange which is gaining an increasing significance in the context of the enlargement of the EU, but also to extend this dialogue to an additional line of inquiry, namely, knowledge representation. This is the discipline that aims at building formal representations of knowledge which can be understood by both humans and computer programs, and in particular, at providing shared conceptual frameworks (ontologies) for facilitating access to information and communication.

Comparative law, legal translation, and knowledge representation approach the legal domain from different perspectives, but share many issues and objectives. Thus, by comparing their methodologies, we can identify differences, commonalities, and prospects for cross-fertilisation.

The workshop is organised by the European University Institute, the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council, the Department of Law and the PhD programme ”Comparative Analysis of Institutions, Economics and Law”, of the University of Turin.