Original article: http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Legal+language/2948757/story.html
This opinion blog article discusses Canada's Bill-C232, which would make bilingual fluency in both English and French mandatory for Canadian Supreme Court judges. Proponents of this bill argue that, although the court's rulings can be translated into different languages, the judges themselves should also be bilingual so that they can read the translation and determine if it upholds the ruling's original intention. In this blog, the Calgary Herald argues that this places an unnecessary, unfair restriction on the pool of Supreme Court nominees, and claims that this bill is politically motivated.
I think that it's just interesting to be able to have this debate in the first place. Canada has two official languages (English and French), and I'm assuming this means that official government business must reflect this language duality. In class, we talked about how even the best translated texts could lose some of their original meaning in the process of translation. But this situation greatly magnifies the issue, because a slight change in meaning could supposedly result in the miscarriage of law.
Though I find proponents of this bill bring up an interesting point, I agree with the author of this article in that I do not think that the justices need to be bilingual in order to function within the government. I know that in the United States, the law is often interpreted by individual judges in lower courts anyways, so slight variation from the original to the translation is not likely to make a significant difference anyways. If there were an egregious error in translation, I'm sure that someone (a professor, student, judge, lawyer, citizen!) would be able to point it out and have the mistranslation corrected.
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This is a really intriguing topic that I've never thought about before. We know about how much confusion and debates there have been in the US Supreme Court over the language of bills, and that's debates over one language. When you introduce another language, the situation gets even messier. I think the fairest and most direct thing to do would be to have all Supreme Court decisions written in one language because much can be lost (or gained) in translation. But then which language should they choose? That would pose another problem.
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