Lawyer-linguist
The job of a lawyer-linguist is a profession with two aspects: legal and linguistic. Accordingly, to perform this demanding and fascinating role as an expert in legal translation, it is necessary to have both a law degree and in-depth knowledge of several foreign languages and the corresponding legal systems. Lawyer-linguists generally translate into their native language or, in rare cases, into the language of their legal studies, which they master perfectly.
At the Court of Justice of the European Union, lawyer-linguists mainly translate legal decisions and documents essential to the handling of cases. They are fully involved in the proceedings and allow the multilingual dissemination of the case-law of the highest court of the European Union.
They can be called upon to carry out other tasks, for example, contributing to the consolidation of legal terminology, providing legal training, or even taking on the role of ‘reference person’ to facilitate the processing and translation of a request for a preliminary ruling.
The job of a lawyer-linguist is constantly evolving, thanks in particular to rapid technological advances. The translation is carried out in a specialised environment (‘translation editor’) using translation memories, terminological databases and the results of neural machine translation.
Lawyer-linguists complete ongoing training throughout their entire career: they learn new languages, develop their ability to use various IT tools and keep their legal knowledge up-to-date.
The requirements in order to work as a lawyer-linguist at the Court are specified in the competition and vacancy notices published on the EPSO or Curia websites.
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