The discussion of the problems of legal translation from a comparative law perspective revolves around the term "denotation". Comparative law studies the differences and similarities between thelaws of different countries providing the basis for the production of bilingual dictionaries that include the information necessary to make legal communication across borders successful. It also helps mutual understanding and the dispelling of prejudice and misinterpretation.
A legal term under legal system A, understood as a systemic term, is transformed into another term under legal system B by finding a term that corresponds with the function of the legal term under legal system A. This allows, for example, the English legal term trust to be translated into German as Treuhand in certain instances.
In the translation of legal terms, one often resorts to pairs of terms which appear somehow connected by a relationship of equivalence. The legal denoters, which have to date been applied in the descriptive model, have the same legal "meaning", but the question is what do they denote? At the very least, the difficulty may illustrate that the two designated terms might lack a common denoter. They function differently than synonyms; the terms "mean" the same thing to jurists, even though they are not identical. They are also not really similar because they exist in the context of different legal and language systems, but still they remain comparable. It can be safely said that the functional method of comparative law has proven the comparability of legal terms.
The terms can also be compared by reference to their connotations; it might be sufficient to provide a linguistic basis for the functional comparative law term in order to determine the connotations of the legal terms.
The structural feature common to legal translation - the absence of universally operative terms of reference - can be overcome only through the comparison of legal institutions on a case-by-case basis, as illustrated above. From today's perspective, it seems justifiable to say that legal translation is in practice as well as in theory is a secure profession demanding special technical knowledge because of its complexity.
The existing findings of mostly terminology-orientated studies on the translation of legal texts have defined the essential problem in legal translation as the legal and technical qualification of legal institutions. The problem of qualification, which is the reinterpretation of mostly incompatible legal terms, can be solved only by comparative law methods.
Nevertheless, the scope of debate surrounding legal translation is characterised by an increasing amount of questions which relate to the technical language and pragmatic aspects of legal language. These are in turn elements of legal linguistics - which is indeed an evolving field of study for which the conditions and methods must still be clarified.
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