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Legal texts are in the focus of both lawyers and translators. This paper
discusses the binary opposition of these two views especially in the light of contract
law. There is one crucial epistemic difference between the point of view of the
translator and the lawyer when it comes to the interpretation of legal texts. In the
translator’s view legal text is traditionally conceived as static as to its nature;
something that already exists in the form of text. Traditionally, the translator is
interested in the text itself as it was written down in a document, i.e. the translator
needs to go back to the frozen moment when a legal document was constructed and
finalised. The lawyer, in contrast, is very much interested not only in the text of the
legal document but also in the contextual surroundings of the text. In fact, for legal
interpretation, sometimes the key-elements for the interpretation come from outside
of the text itself. This paper concludes that legal translation is in many cases closer
to transcreation than it is to traditionally understood translation.