Legal Meaning Assumptions – What are the Consequences for Legal Interpretation and Legal Translation?

In this article, I discusssimilarities and differences between legaltranslators and legal interpreters. Thediscussion is centred around the impact thatthe choice of background assumptions as tomeaning of linguistic items in legal texts hason the way lawyers and translatorsconceptualise their own work, respectively. Thedispute between proponents of a strong and aweaker approach to legal meaning in legalinterpretation is presented and the relationsto legal translation is investigated. By way ofconclusion I present some of the majorconsequences for legal translators of optingfor the empirically more easily justifiableweaker approach.