HOW TO TEACH LEGAL FRENCH TO LITHUANIAN SPEAKERS?

Legal language has its own technical terms that a translator has to know. This article considers some specificities of French and Lithuanian legal terms as well as specific turns of the sentence and the ways to train students to recognize and use them.


INTRODUCTION
Since its accession to the European Union in 2004, Lithuania has multiplied its links with the other member states, making more political and economical ties with them.
Among these states is France. As Lithuania's exports destination France is ranking the 4 th place 1 . Equally significant for Lithuania is France's political role in the Union, first of all, because a significant part of the EU legislation is primarily drafted in French. Moreover, Lithuania will assume the presidency of the Union in the second half of 2013 and will have to be even more acquainted with its major languages. That is to say it is relevant in Lithuania to learn French for business and political purposes, especially legal French.
writing a legal document is a serious task. The consequences of a rule of law are of utmost significance because they are mandatory to everyone. It is the same for the law of obligations, the parties being tied by the contract they have made, pacta sunt servanda as the Latin saying goes 2 . A characteristic feature of 1 Lithuanian Development Agency in its business review Advantage Lithuania 2007 indicates (p. 12) that France ranked the 4 th place in 2005 among Lithuania's top ten exports for an amount of 665m Euro (7% of the total). 2 The significance of the private contract is also underlined by the motto of the French notaries: Lex est quod notamus, "What we write is law". a legal text is its compulsory nature. No other branch of the language possesses this characteristic.
Legal language is a complicated and technical one. It requires years to learn for the student who reads the law. Most often the translator, who does not have any qualification in this domain, has to know the legal terms of his or her native language and those of the foreign language he works with. In other words, the legal translator has to deal with comparative law.
This task is all the more difficult because legal vocabulary as a whole in a national language is estimated to amount from 10 000 to 20 000 terms. That is to say that the legal translator has to deal with a corpus varying from 20 000 to 40 000 words 3 .
In order to familiarize future translators with legal French the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies of Vilnius University set up a course on legal French. This course is destined to students in the second year of Master in Translation Studies.
The whole course lasts one academic year. It consists of three teaching foci, realised during two academic hours a week. The foci are: • French civil proceedings (the first term only) • French general legal terminology • two practical courses of legal translation (French to Lithuanian and Lithuanian to French, taught with the assistance of a Lithuanian native speaker). The duration of the courses being quite short, their content has to be clearly defined. The gauntlet to be run is to teach law terms without presenting a classical law course. The question is: How to teach legal French to non-native French speakers? How to teach it to students who usually have little idea about the law of their own country?
Thus the purpose of this article is to indicate the most generic problems that a legal translator may face and to discuss the way how to train the students to solve them while putting emphasis on the particularities of French and Lithuanian. we have chosen to focus our study on four main difficulties that are, in our opinion, especially relevant in law translation and will become the framework of the analysis to follow.
we will consider: I. Legal vocabulary II. Counterparts in the target language III. Vagueness IV. Style of the text I. LEGAL VOCABULARY we will here consider the particularities of the legal vocabulary (A) and consider thereafter the pedagogical exercises that will help the students to deal with the problems that may occur from it (B).

A. Peculiarities of legal vocabulary
First of all it has to be noticed that the Lithuanian legal system is close to that of France, and the Lithuanian Civil Code 4 (Civilinis kodeksas) has been strongly influenced by the French Civil Code, so the concepts in the two States are common, which makes the comparison between the two systems easier. Legal language is highly technical and often appears difficult to understand to the non-lawyer. Its vocabulary may be divided into two categories: technical terms (1) and collocations (2).

Technical terms a) Technical terms that exclusively belong to the legal domain
They have a meaning only in the context of law. Usually these words are the most amazing to the non-lawyer and do not appear in the everyday language. we can quote: exécuteur testamentaire (Eng: executor; Lit: testamento vykdytojas), pleine propriété (Eng: freehold; Lit: besąlygiška nuosavybės teisė), etc.

b) Double membership terms
These words may have one meaning or more in everyday language and another in the field of law. It emphasizes the narrow ties between the vocabulary of law and that of ordinary language.
The French word meuble (Eng: furniture; Lit: baldas) for instance has only one sense in the common vocabulary. The term points out tables, chairs, etc. But the meaning of meuble differs in the legal context. Here a meuble distinguishes everything that is not an immeuble (Eng: real estate; Lit: nekilnojamas turtas). That is to say this term encloses a table or a chair, but also an animal or standing crop destined to be cut and sold. 5 The differences between the sense that a word can have in a legal context and the one it has in everyday language may be more or less significant.
The difference of sense is partial when the legal meaning appears as the extension of the common meaning. That is the case, for instance, for the French term aliments which in its usual sense means food (Lit: maistas) but in its legal sense means "everything that is necessary for life: food, clothing, housing, health and so on." 6 In some situations the difference of meaning may be absolute. It is the case for the French word minute. 7 As in English it designates one thing in the common language and another in the sphere of law: "an original act drawn up by a public officer" or a "court decision kept at the Clerk's Office" (which in Lithuanian may be translated as protokolas). we could also quote saisir (Eng: to catch; Lit: griebti, čiupti / imti) meaning also to submit or to refer a matter to a court (Lit: kreiptis į teismą).
It has to be noted that some legal terms have entered the everyday language, like force majeure in French. Legal Lithuanian also uses force majeure or uses the expression: įvykus nepaprastoms aplinkybėms, kurių negalima nei numatyti, nei išvengti ("Unusual events it is impossible to foresee and avoid"). Also force majeure aplinkybė (case of force majeure) is occasionally used. Nevertheless in Lithuanian these terms have not entered the common speech.
It has to be noticed that double-membership words are not to be confused with false friends. The false friend is a word that exists in two languages but with different meanings. To the contrary of what happens very often between French and English there is no such problem between French and Lithuanian. These languages being too different one from the other, there is almost no risk of confusion with this regard, even if some words have been borrowed, such as asortimentas (assortment), atašė (attaché) or diplomatinis demaršas (diplomatic démarche). we can anyway quote the case of the false friend filialas (Eng: branch) meaning succursale in French, while the French filiale (Eng: subsidiary) means dukterinė / kontroliuojama įmonė in Lithuanian.

Support words
Beside the technical terms, it has to be noticed that there exist words, usually verbs, that do not have a purely technical meaning by themselves but nevertheless are necessary to assist the technical words. They are used to frame technical terms but their own sense may be less or void. Some technical terms can only be used with a support verb. The support words are usually easier to understand than the technical ones.

B. Pedagogical exercises
As a significant part of the French legal terms comes from civil proceedings, a course is specially devoted to this subject. The course is as simplified as possible, of course, stressing on the key words. The principles of the civil proceedings are explained to the extent it is necessary to explain the terms that have to be learned.
Some chosen legal cases will be given to the students to make them familiar with technical words and support words as well. A good way to memorize these terms is to fill in the gaps of missing words in a legal case.
As for the general French legal terminology, the set of lectures starts with a basic expose of the French legal organization so that students become acquainted with the French legal system. The content of this course is more likely to vary from year to year as the needs of the students have to be considered. Basically the aspects taken into account are: • Business law • Law of obligations • Competition law

• Intellectual property law • International law • European law
These lectures are presented along with various readings of legal texts: laws, regulations, cases, different types of contracts, law reviews, scholars' works, etc.
In order to memorize and implement this knowledge the following exercises are proposed: • Comments on the current legal subjects in the press • Learning the ways how to use the French Civil Code • Comparison of diverse laws • Summing up of a legal case • Gap filling exercises, etc.

II. COUNTERPARTS IN THE TARGET LANGUAGE
In this section we will consider the difficulties that may rise translating the name of an institution, a profession, a procedure, a concept, proper to a legal system (A) and the pedagogical exercises that may be proposed about this issue (B).

A. Issue
Since each system has its own history and its own particularities, a translator faces considerable difficulties when a term does not have a direct equivalent in the target language. with this regard legal terms may be divided into three groups 8 :

Semantic counterparts
These terms have a real counterpart in the target language. For instance Ordre public finds easily its match word with Public order (Lit: viešoji tvarka). In this case there is no major difficulty for translation.

Terms that only have a functional counterpart
Here there is not a strict equivalence between the two languages, but a partial equivalence does exist in the two of them. It is often the case for the institutions and titles. For instance, the French legal profession notaire does not have a real equivalent either in the United Kingdom or in the United States. 9 we could also quote the case of the Lithuanian company Uždaroji akcinė bendrovė which is close to the British Limited Partnership or the French Société à responsabilité limitée. These denominations represent a category of companies common to different countries. Nevertheless, because each of the above-mentioned companies is proper to a specific national legal system, its counterpart in a foreign language may only be functional.

Untranslatable terms
These terms designate a reality which does not exist in a legal culture, whence the difficulties to translate. Many of them appear in the documents of civil proceedings. A good example is common law, thus this term is usually directly used in French.
Interesting is the case of citoyenneté (citizenship) and nationalité (nationality). Usually citoyenneté is linked to pilietybė and nationalité is linked to tautybė. According to their etymologies those are equivalent terms, nevertheless a closer look at the definitions reveals different legal realities in each country.
In France citizenship is the status of the citizen, a citizen being a person who enjoys, on the territory of the state to which he belongs, its civil and political rights. Nationality is the legal link between a person and a sovereign State. 10 For the French administration, in principle, French citizens are persons who have the French nationality and enjoy their civil and political rights. 11 It appears that citizenship is an extension of the concept of nationality, even if sometimes in the everyday and law languages the two terms may be used synonymously. Some scholars even use the words interchangeably in their works. 12 In Lithuania, pilietybė is the membership of a person to a State and the legal situation that results of it. tautybė is the membership to a people/nation. 13 In consequence, a Lithuanian citizen may have Lithuanian, or Russian, or Polish nationality, for instance. Such a situation is not possible in French Law. This dichotomy has not to be mistaken for the double nationality, which does not exist in Lithuania. Hence in Lithuania citizenship and nationality are clearly two different concepts.
As a result, the Lithuanian terms do not match precisely their French and English counterparts. Thus the English version of Pilietybės įstatymas is translated by Law on citizenship 14 because this Lithuanian law, of course, has only domestic purposes. But on the current Lithuanian ID cards pilietybė is translated by nationality, because this document may be used in other EU member states, and because this term is closer to the term of nationality of the countries that do not differentiate between citizenship and nationality in the way Lithuania does.

B. Pedagogical exercises
Usually there are two possibilities offered to the translator if a direct counterpart does not exist: • To translate directly if a literal translation already exists and provide an explanation of the term in a footnote if necessary. • To translate by using an equivalent term, giving similarly an explanation in a footnote. The importance of the explanation given varies according to the targeted readership: a lawyer, a businessman, a layman.
For instance, it is problematic to translate the Lithuanian apygardos teismas 15 for it does not have a real counterpart in France, thus it would be wise to keep the term as it is and add a footnote.
It appears that the students have to know if a counterpart exists or not. The more they will read the French legal press, the better they will know about the French legal system. Understandably, they have to broaden their knowledge about the legal system of their own country as well. The readings will help them to draw up their own list of institutions. The various texts studied in class as well as the translations will help the students to achieve this goal.

III. VAGUENESS
Vagueness is the ambiguity that may be found in a text. It has a very particular significance in legal texts. Usually in other domains ambiguities are fortuitous. In the legal field this vagueness may be deliberate. Indeed, the framer of a legal document may wish to let open various interpretations of it. we will consider the main characteristics of vagueness (A) and then its specificities in French and Lithuanian (B).

A. Characteristics of vagueness
we may distinguish three types of vagueness 16 : 1) Vagueness of the lexicon 2) Vagueness of the syntax 3) Vagueness of the context

Vagueness of the lexicon
Vagueness of the lexicon may be claimed each time the context does not give any clue about the meaning of a word which has more than one sense. For instance, the French link word aussi means also or then. défendre means to defend but it also means to forbid. Louer, like in English (to rent) and Lithuanian (nuomoti) is a verb that may apply either to the renter who rents an object or premises from an owner or an owner that rents an object or premises to a renter.

Vagueness of the syntax
Typically one of the biggest ambiguities may rise from an excessive use of the pronouns. In so doing the ambiguity becomes at the same time syntactic and contextual. It is obvious in the following example: « Le détaillant s'engage à fournir un produit équivalent à l'acheteur en cas de disfonctionnement constaté sur un appareil vendu par le détaillant, l'appareil devant être présenté dans le délai d'une semaine ». It could be translated this way into English: "The retailer will furnish a similar product to the buyer in case of malfunction of the product sold by the retailer in this case it shall be presented within one week".
In this sentence we may wonder who (the retailer or the buyer) is supposed to present the product within one week.
Equally punctuation matters very much in a legal text. The location of a comma in a text may even lead to litigation. The Court of Appeals of Dijon rendered a sentence about such a problem 17 , the litigious clause was: « Le fournisseur garantit la maintenance du système, et la mise à niveau technologique gratuitement pendant une durée de cinq ans… ». It could be translated this way into English: "The furnisher assures the maintenance of the system, and the technologic updating for free for duration of five years". Anyway a closer reading shows that the gratuity only applies to sole updating and not to the maintenance. 18

Vagueness of the context
It mostly happens when an element is contradicted by another one in the same text or is inaccurate. we could quote for instance the case of "Chambre internationale de Paris", which does not exist, as the competent institution in an arbitration agreement, oftentimes mentioned instead of "Chambre de Commerce internationale à Paris (International chamber of commerce in Paris), which may lead to confusion.

B. Matters of vagueness between French and Lithuanian
A significant difference between French and Lithuanian is that French has the category of articles, determined and undetermined, whereas Lithuanian has not; the latter uses a complex system of declensions. As a consequence, it may happen that a Lithuanian term appears unclear to a French reader. It is the case, for instance, for kitą kartą, which without more precision may mean another time or next time.
with regard to ambiguity the French term sans aucun doute (Engl: without any doubt) which is easily translated into Lithuanian by be jokios abejonės may be quite astonishing to foreign speakers. In Lithuanian, as in English, the words jokio and any are just here to enhance the sense. But if the Lithuanian term be abejonės has the meaning of without doubt it does not match with the French sans doute. Actually it has to be noticed that sans doute has the meaning of tikriausiai (Eng: likely).
It may be concluded that a literal translation of the Lithuanian term be abejonės may be correctly translated by the English term without doubt, but it is a serious mistake to translate it into French by sans doute. The French term sans doute is very tricky because only a French native speaker may know there is a difference between sans doute and sans aucun doute.
It has to be said that, of course, if the to be text translated does not have any ambiguity, the translator cannot create one. Nevertheless one should never correct the ambiguities that may appear in the language source for fear of deforming the thought of its author.
As for the pronouns, it is far better to repeat the nouns as they are mentioned rather than use pronouns that could lead to confusion. The role of the translator is not to clarify but to warn with notes on ambiguities and problems in the original text.
To train the students to deal with ambiguity matters they will be asked to: • study the way a rule of law is framed • study the wording of a contract • get used to translating texts such as laws and contracts.

IV. THE STYLE OF THE TEXT
This section is dedicated to the most "literary" aspect of the legal translation: the style of the text. Administration and Justice govern the everyday life of the citizen and use a specific tone that they are the only ones to use. The innate authority they have is expressed in their texts that are solemn. 19 Private Law, notably Law of Obligations with its contracts, also has its typical turns of sentences. French and Lithuanian languages have their own ways to express the tone of legal documents.

The tone of the text
The terms used by the administration when it has something to communicate or ask are remarkable. For example, they may vary according to the persons addressed. Three categories may be distinguished 20 : 1) The superior 2) The equal 3

) The inferior
Thus the verb to inform will be translated in case 1) by rendre compte, in case 2) by informer and in case 3) by faire connaître, this latter having a variant faire savoir which stresses on the distance between the superior and the inferior.
Another particularity of administration and justice is that they do not use the question mark. The administration does not condescend to ask a question. 21 For instance, we shall not write y a-t-il lieu de …? (English : is it necessary to…?; Lit: ar reikia…?) but la question se pose de savoir si… (Eng : the matter is... ; Lit : klausimas yra…) or nous vous serions bien obligés de bien vouloir nous in-diquer…. (Eng: We should be greatly obliged if you would kindly…; Lit: Būtume labai dėkingi, jeigu galėtumėte nurodyti…)

2) On and il
It has to be noticed that the pronoun on in French has the meaning of we, but is quite undefined and impersonal (a comparison may be made with the German man). For instance, the phrase on veillera à ce que (it will be provided that) is quite impersonal, nevertheless the pronoun on is to be avoided in some legal contexts because it may sound too familiar. The impersonal mode in French may also be conveyed by the pronoun il similar to the English it: il est convenu que (it has been agreed) more suitable than on a convenu que. These phrases may be translated into Lithuanian by a passive form (sudaroma....).

Common speech and legal speech
Some turns of sentence may be specific to law language, for instance, in Lithuanian it would be used: "Sutartis įsigalioja nuo jos pasirašymo momento ir galioja iki viena iš sutarties šalių raštu praneša kitai šaliai apie ketinimą ją nutraukti. (The contract takes force from the moment of the signature and ends when one of the parties declares to the other one its will to withdraw oneself from the contract). In common language writing iki tol, kol or iki to momento, kol would be more correct, but writing only iki in a legal context is relevant.

Special gerund
It has to be noticed that Lithuanian has specific grammatical features that can effectively be used in a contract: a) esamojo laiko padalyvis (a form close to the English gerund, derived from the present active participle) as in : "Ši sutartis gali būti keičiama, šalims pasirašant atskirą susitarimą, pridedamą prie šios sutarties" (Eng : "The contract may be modified if the parties write a separate agreement joined to this contract").
b) Būtojo laiko padalyvis (a form close to the English gerund, derived from the past active participle): "Šalims susitarus pirkėjas gali grąžinti prekes pardavėjui". (Eng: "If the parties have agreed so, the seller can send the goods back").

B. Pedagogical exercises
The course will tend to familiarize students with the styles of national laws, European legislation, legal cases, each type of these documents having its specific style. Students will also be trained to express an idea in different ways. Translations made in common will be quite useful in this regard. The students will be asked to draw up their own contracts according to the models provided in class.

CONCLUSION
Knowing technical words is a prerequisite to legal translation, but definitely not sufficient enough: it is also necessary to know the styles and the turns of sentences of the different types of legal texts. Law is a domain that constantly evolves, requiring the students to keep their knowledge of the legal French up to date. The purpose of the course is to initiate them into legal French and to show them the way to deepen their knowledge of it. As we have shown in the article, for the purpose a variety of forms may be used.