concluding remarks: looking back to the future of legal history What I have just described refers to the act of translating a text, the translation process in the narrower sense. But in fact all the same steps have to be taken when ideas, norms, or practices are transferred into another cultural context. Using the metaphor of ‘cultural translation’ makes us aware of these steps and invites us to reflect on the very process of reproducing foreign knowledge.5 Eachof the steps contributes to shaping new meanings and understandings. It becomes evident that ‘legal culture’ is not something given and stable, but constantly reshaped and renegotiated. The metaphor of translation not only helps in understanding the process of the reproduction of legal ideas, norms, or practices based on foreign models. It also gives us the opportunity to better understand the perspective of the recipients, be it the readers of translated legal literature, legal scholars discussing the implications of new ideas for legal doctrine, or judges and legal advisers whose task it is to put the doctrines into practice. Translation studies have shown that the understanding of a translation strongly depends on its new context. The social realities in which the recipients live, their experience, and their values shape their imagination, and thus their interpretation of the translated text. This is the case with every communication, but it is particularly strong with translations. As the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset pointed out in his essay ‘The Misery and the Splendor of Translation’ (1937), translation is a ‘permanent literaryflou’.6 Translations are like fuzzy photographs, they are never fully clear to the reader. They refer to a context that is not familiar to the reader, so imagination is required to a greater degree than in the usual reading practice. eign Law in Translation: If Truth be told’, in Michael Freeman & Fiona Smith (eds.), Law and Language (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 513–32. 5 Lena Foljanty, ‘Legal Transfer as Cultural Translation: On the Consequences of a Metaphor’, Kritische Vierteljahresschrift für Gesetzgebung & Rechtswissenschaft 2 (2015), 89–107 (SSRNMax Planck Institute for European Legal History Research Papers 2015-09). 6 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Miseria y esplendor de la traducción’ (first pub. 1937), tr. Elizabeth Gamble Miller (1992), in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 52. 359
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