Interpreters and translators should be recognized as pioneers

Here in Greenland, interpreters and translators often have to create new Greenlandic legal language. This is an important contribution to society that deserves more attention, says a researcher who, in a new project, is taking a closer look at how difficult legal translation actually is.

Although it has been 16 years since the Self-Government Act came into force (2009) and Greenlandic thus became the only official language in this country, all Greenlandic legislation is still written in Danish. Following established procedures, the legal texts are then translated into Greenlandic before being discussed and adopted in the Greenlandic Parliament. The reason for this workflow is that it is still mostly Danish immigrants who do not know much Greenlandic who are employed as lawyers in the central administration of the Self-Government.

With the new law program at Ilisimatusarfik, which started in 2018, there is hope for the future in terms of more Greenlandic speaking lawyers entering our labor market.

- But until that becomes a reality, I think we need to start recognizing interpreters and translators much more for the significant efforts they have made and continue to make in shaping the building blocks of a Greenlandic legal language, says Therese Lind Benhardt, a PhD student at Ilisimatusarfik.

In her new PhD project, she is investigating how Greenlandic legal terminology is developed in practice. Firstly, she is looking at how translators in the Self-Government's translation office work with translating our legislation. Secondly, she is looking at a project that started in 2023 at Oqaasileriffik (the Language Secretariat) concerning the development of Greenlandic legal terminology. The aim is to shed light on how legal terminology is being developed in Greenland in various ways. This could be useful knowledge for those who will be involved in using and developing the terminology in the future, such as interpreters, translators, and Greenlandic speaking lawyers graduated from Ilisimatusarfik.

Therese was born and raised mainly in Copenhagen, but in 2013 she moved to Nuuk, where she has become a permanent resident. She herself worked for several years as a lawyer in the central administration of the Self-Government and has therefore experienced the work processes at close quarters. She later studied linguistics and Greenlandic at the University of Copenhagen and Ilisimatusarfik. Like many others, she has noticed that the legislation passed by our politicians here in Greenland often draws on legal concepts from outside the country, especially from Denmark. Our interpreters and translators must invent legal terms for these concepts in Greenlandic. This can be a difficult task, and one may find, for example, that several different Greenlandic terms are used for the same concept in legislative texts. Oqaasileriffik is currently working to make Greenlandic legal terminology more unambiguous than it is today.

- However, the new work at Oqaasileriffik is partially based on terminology lists obtained from the country's translation offices. In other words, it is the work that has been done for many years in the translation offices that forms the basis for the new project at Oqaasileriffik. The employees at the translation offices are pioneers in developing a Greenlandic legal language, and I think that should be highlighted more, says Therese.