Chapter 6 Legal comparison and the (im)possibility of legal translation Jennifer Hendry* ‘Translation […] is thus the art of facing the impossible, of confront- ing unbridgeable discontinuities between texts, between languages, and between people. […] [T]o attempt to “translate” is to experience a failure at once radical and felicitous’ James Boyd White (1990: 257) ‘Translating is not a simple act: it is not enough to substitute the space traversed for the movement; a series of rich and complex operations is necessary’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980: 486) Introduction In a 1951 article, the US comparatist Ferdinand Stone observed that the ‘encour- agement […] given to “translations of basic legal works”’ and the ‘increasing attention given by many universities to building up libraries in “foreign law”’ were an ‘indispensable first step’ in comparative law (1951: 327). According to Stone, these two considerations naturally went hand in hand for, in order to compare a feature of domestic law with a foreign version of it, not only must the scholar have access to the relevant materials but those must also be rendered in a form understandable to her. However, this linguistic translation of foreign legal texts is merely the starting point of the process of comparison; although nothing effective can be accomplished up to this point, once a scholar is able to read and comprehend the materials she is still only at the very beginning of the comparative enterprise. Indeed, as Stone emphasises, while ‘it may be enough [for the librarian] to collect and catalogue in substantial volumes translations of all the legal materials, […] for the “comparative” lawyer these are but the tools, the means, and not the end’ (ibid). Although scholars have long been engaged with the conundrum of transla- tion, a distinction must be drawn between the linguistic translation of foreign legal texts, such as those discussed by Stone, and the more contested notion GLANERT 9780415642705 PRINT.indd 87 GLANERT 9780415642705 PRINT.indd 87 11/03/2014 08:52 11/03/2014 08:52