Although U.S. researchers will usually want translations of foreign legal materials, not all foreign legal works are translated into English. They are usually available for constitutions, sometimes for codes or statutes, and only rarely for case law. When they are available, they are not official, and their accuracy varies. The first choice for the researcher is to find collections of legal materials already translated. Some translations of legal materials are available on foreign government sites, commercial datbases, and foreign bar associations and law firms. If there is none available, the researcher may have to rely on translation of individual words and phrases to supplement partial knowledge of the language, or electronic or automated translation of websites and documents.
Law Library of Congress: Translation of National Legislation into English. A research guide with listings by country of English language print and web resources (legislative, judicial, and secondary), as well as the official sources. Selected jurisdictions include Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, and Russia. The guide includes sections on international organizations and international courts with English language resources and translated national laws.
Codices (Council of Europe): Translations or English-language summaries of European constitutional law decisions, and constitutional provisions and statutes related to the judiciary from countries around the world. The site includes an alphabetical index to topics for finding cases.
Foreign Law Guide (subscription database): The database includes titles of translations of legal materials and English-language summaries of foreign law, with links if they are available on the web.
Institute for Transnational Law: Foreign Law Translations: A project with select decisions and statutes from France and Germany translated into English. Cases are mostly older, with no recent additions to the database.
China
France
Germany
Israel
Japan
Republic of Korea
Mexico
The Netherlands
Taiwan
Spain
United Arab Emirates
Vietnam
If you are able to read some materials in a foreign language, you may just need a few specialized legal terms in English translation to read the document. Even if you plan to use an electronic translation like Google Translate when you find a foreign legal document, you may need to translate individual legal terms to search in foreign legal databases or government websites. However, it is better to start with a date or citation (numerals) to search in databases in foreign languages.
In addition, the law library reference collection includes bilingual legal dictionaries.
Use caution when using electronic translation, since your results are not as accurate as those created by human translators, and machine translation sometimes has difficulty with technical legal terms. Legal terms may have different meanings in different countries or may have no equivalents in other languages. Limit your use to identifying documents and websites and getting a general understanding of the document.
