Title: Digital Law and the Emergence of New Legal Terms: Challenges for Legal Translation and Interpretation
Authors: Khujakulov Sunnatullo
Volume: 9
Issue: 12
Pages: 11-18
Publication Date: 2025/12/28
Abstract:
The rapid expansion of digital-law frameworks - including regulation of blockchain, smart contracts, data governance, and AI-driven systems - has spurred a surge in neologisms and domain-specific legal terminology. This study investigates the emergence of new legal terms in the digital law domain and explores the challenges that translators and interpreters face when rendering these terms across languages and legal systems (specifically English, Uzbek, and Russian). Employing a mixed methodology combining corpus analysis of statutory texts, regulatory documents, and smart-contract templates with semantic and comparative term analysis, the research identifies a range of translation difficulties, including lexical gaps, semantic ambiguity, and cross-system conceptual mismatches. The results reveal that many digital-law terms lack direct equivalents in target languages or require paraphrase, which risks loss of legal precision or interpretive neutrality. The study argues that achieving functional and doctrinal equivalence demands not only linguistic expertise but also deep familiarity with the relevant legal and technological contexts. The paper concludes by proposing principles for translators - including the use of explicative translation, standardized glossaries, and ontological mapping - to enhance accuracy and consistency in legal translation and interpretation in the age of digital law.