Bilingual Co-Drafting of Legislative Texts

The drafting of legislation in Canada has long relied on the use of the “silo” method of translation from one language version to another. For decades, laws tabled in the Parliament of Canada by the Canadian government were drafted in English and then translated into French by translators with no particular legal expertise. This practice resulted in language versions that were riddled with discrepancies. This approach has evolved over the years into a model of bilingual legislative drafting: co-drafting. In this video, John Mark Keys, Professor of law and specialist in legal drafting, outlines the major steps in the evolution of the bilingual legislative drafting model in the Government of Canada.

“The translators of federal statutes did not, to say the least, have the latitude to formulate the french version in a way that was appropriate to its genius. Although competent, they were afraid, given the context of the time, to stray from the English text. In addition, expressions copied from English were often imposed on them as being established and therefore irreplaceable.”

Lionel Levert, “Jurilinguistics: An Indispensible Support for Co-Editing” (2015) 28:53-72 Intl J Sem L53.