Software on Intersemiotic Legal Translation

Olimpia G. Loddo (University of Cagliari) and Andrea Addis (Infora) started a collaboration a few months ago, and continued interacting and to put together our competencies (informatics and philosophy of law) to develop a prototype that performs legal translation of the clauses of a labour contract and is in general aimed the possibility to develop an intersemiotic translations application.

• Our software works by directly translating a drafted formulary (from a known model).
• We did some preliminary experiments to make it work with free text but we see it as future work.
• The software is programmed to perform a graphical translation of the different clauses in accordance with the different kinds of rules they express. For instance, a set of rules that build the hierarchical structure of a company will be described through an organigram. The time table will still be an important instrument to translate the timing of the different contractual terms but different icons will express the different events that characterize the interaction between employer and employees.

These different strategies of translation are partially based on my previous works on intersemiotic translation and focus on already existing graphical codes in use in non-legal normative communication. E.g., Commercials, cartoons, Japanese anime. These are codes that are familiar to a wide international audience. We already have a prototype but it is an extremely early version.

In the pictures, you can see our very early results.