Language as a Legal Tool: The Intersection of Translation Studies and Corporate Governance

This article examines the complex interconnection underlying language and corporate governance, treating language as a tool for constructing legal concepts and enforcing the law. While the linguistic nature of law has long been recognized, this article focuses on corporate governance to argue that polyglotism makes a difference because there are indeed unique challenges to the use of language in corporate governance. Such research reveals how legal regulators use language to influence power dynamics, and most importantly, and equally important, it shows how language also influences the law, leading to a better and more nuanced understanding of the very creation and implementation of governance mechanisms. In corporate governance practices, pluralism and linguistic diversity make a difference. Translation research also demonstrates that language mediation can be a useful, even essential, tool for understanding the subtle ways in which language is used in corporate governance, so that we can better understand how exactly to ensure the basic legal requirements that corporate governance seeks to meet. There is also pressure to translate without errors and to translate correctly because the translation “just” has meaning. The proposal draws on real-life case studies to explain why corporate governance documents need to be translated carefully and why a “collective approach” is required when dealing with the linguistic and translation challenges of corporate governance.