Legal terminology has been a nightmare across language. Even simple terms like ‘wife’ or ‘father’ defy definition as inn different cultural milieu they have widely divergent implications. In a society where men and women live together outside wedlock, separation mean something different from a society where monogamy is the norm. ‘Wife’ in these situations will also mean different things. There are many differences in styles of marriages as there are societies.

When one comes to administration even within a single language zone there is no dearth of examples which create problems for those who seek uniformity. In the Hindi zone, the word for ‘Director’ is ‘Nirdeshak’, ‘Nideshak’, ‘Sanchalak’, etc. Similarly for the word ‘grievance’ which the central glossary gives ‘shikayat’, U.P. uses ‘k?sht’, Bihar ‘vyatha’ and M.P. ‘dukh’. Those who seek uniformity would like to attribute register specific meaning to each one of them and keep only one for legal purposes. For example, ‘Nirdeshak’ would refer to the Director of a play or cinema while ‘Nideshak’ refers to the Director in a Government office.

If one looks across languages, one would find what while in Bengali the word ‘shiksha’ means ‘education’ in Marathi it means ‘punishment’. Marathi makes a distinction between ‘shiksha’ and ‘shikshan’ to denote ‘punishment’ and ‘education’.

One of the reasons why legal terminology in India poses a problem is that choice of Sanskritic, Persian, or popular vocabulary would determine the style of the text. For example, a cheque crossed could be translated as ‘shajgh cek’ or ‘na:mdeya cek’, one being urduised and the other Sanskritised version used in Hindi. As the choice ‘danta’, ‘tooth’, would yield the collocation ‘danta cikitsa’, but the choice ‘da~?t’ would yield ‘da~?t ke ila:j’, similarly the choice of one or the other form would yield two different styles.

A terminology is not synonymous with a concept. No amount of creation of terminology will help, if there is no clarity of concept. For example, if one does not know what is an “affidavit” a term in a language known, is not going to be of much help. Often people use legal glossaries which give technical meaning of words used in the legal field. They even give special connotation of general words used in the legal register. But very often such glossaries may be inadequate as they may not give adequate representation to the concepts. It has therefore been suggested that special conceptual glossaries organised taxonomically in semantically classified blocks be prepared which could list a concept and give two or more terms which are used to cover that concept. In natural sciences often more neologisms are created in comparison to social sciences where the tendency is to re-define existing terms. Even if efforts are made from time to time to standardise the terminology, individual authors have their preferred terms and therefore it is difficult to make them unequivocal. Many of the terminologies have emerged in the context of developed countries and are therefore inadequate to meet the contexts of developing countries.

In translating statutes into regional languages it is important that clarity and precision is ensured and discrepancies and contradictions avoided. For this purpose, often, word for word translation may prove elusive. Sometimes transcreation instead of translation is resorted to meet contingencies. For Example, the word ‘damages’ means ‘compensation of loss arising out of a breach of contract’ or ‘compensation for injury arising out of a tort’. These two concepts are expressed by two different words as ‘ilappi:u’ and ‘ti:´ki:u’. The term ‘stolen property’ is literally translated as ‘tiruupporu½’ but is transcreated as ‘ka½½apporul’.