Searching Law in a Multilingual Environment

In the actual multilingual and multicultural environment there is a significant need, in the academic environment, in the legal profession, in business settings as well as in the context of public administration services to citizens, of common understanding and exchange of legal concepts of the various legal systems, while there is a strong pressure for the preservation of their basic sense and value. Both requirements are quite difficult to meet, complicated by the complexity of legal language and by the variety of modalities used to express law within the various legal systems. Unlike a number of technical and scientific disciplines, where a fair correspondence exists between concepts across languages, serious difficulties arise in interpreting law across countries and languages, due to the system-bound nature of legal terminology. This volume focuses on cross-language retrieval systems' ability to facilitate access to legal information across different languages and legal orders. As such, issues are addressed relating to linguistics and translation theory, comparative law, theory of law, as well as natural language processing techniques, while some recommendations are provided with the aim to contribute to cross-language retrieval of law.