El català jurídic: qüestions pendents relacionades amb la traducció i la terminologia tenint en compte la història, el marc legal i el procés de normalització del català (Catalan legal language: pending questions related to translation and terminology, taking into account history, legal framework and liguistic normalization process of catalan language)

The Catalan legal language was born in the Middle Ages. In fact, the oldest texts are translations from Latin legal texts. In its origin, the Catalan legal language was used in thosemultilingual institutions where Latin, French, Aragonese and Castilian were spoken. Legal and administrative documents were written normally in one language and then latertranslated into the officially recognised languages. This was also the situation during the historical existence of the County of Barcelona, the Crown of Aragon and the Austrian Kingdom in Spain. Together with the use of legal Catalan in translations, legal terminology in Catalan also developed when the Catalan legal institutions had the power to legislate and administrate their own laws in Catalonia. This is why we believe that the development oflegal Catalan and legal terminology in Catalan runs parallel to the official recognition of the Catalan language by the political institutions in the Spanish State.This policy of linguistic normalization, driven by Generalitat, has promoted the use of legal Catalan by public administrations. In recent years, the use of Catalan has spread in the public administration bodies of the autonomous government, and it has also increased its presence in other sectors such as the courts, public registries, corporations, etc. In this process of normalization, translation has played in important role, as this normalization has been achieved through massive translation work from Castilian into Catalan which has made necessary the elaboration of many bilingual terminological resources from Castilian into Catalan.Finally, we defend the need for this elaboration of these multilingual terminological resources due to the huge number of translators who would use these resources