Voices of Law, Languages of Identity: Translating Otherness in the EU

This paper examines the European legal domain as a paradigmatic arena for the encounter between legal cultures, languages, and subjectivities. Within the European Union, multilingualism is not merely an administrative constraint but a constitutive feature of its legal architecture, shaping both the production and interpretation of law. Legal translation, situated at the intersection of linguistic mediation and conceptual negotiation, becomes a privileged site where the dialectic between “self” and “other” unfolds—between national legal traditions and supranational harmonization. The analysis focuses on the growing role of English as a de facto legal lingua franca in EU institutions, academia, and cross-border practice. While English facilitates communication across jurisdictions, it simultaneously raises critical questions concerning conceptual equivalence, cultural embeddedness, and epistemic asymmetries. Through the combined lenses of translation studies, legal linguistics, and genre analysis, the paper investigates how legal English both enables and obscures alterity: it serves as a vehicle of mutual intelligibility but may also act as a homogenizing force that privileges certain legal epistemologies over others. Ultimately, the paper argues that legal language in the EU functions as a field of cultural and institutional translation where otherness—linguistic, conceptual, and epistemic—is not an obstacle to overcome but a constitutive element of the European legal order itself.