Cairo, 17 December 2025

A new book by Fathi M. A. Ahmed, Thinking Like a Legal Translator, is to be launched as a practice-driven guide to the craft, pressures, and professional judgment that define high-stakes legal translation. Framed as a “journey” through real working conditions, the book sets out to make visible what often remains hidden in finished translated texts: the decisions, risks, and trade-offs that shape legal meaning across languages.

At the heart of the book is an attempt to map how professional legal translators actually think—especially when precision is not merely stylistic, but legally consequential. Across four chapters and a set of document-based appendices, the work argues that legal translation is less about replacing words than about managing legal effect, institutional expectations, and the reader’s ability to rely on the target text as an operative instrument.

A Roadmap to “the Opposite Shore”
Chapter I introduces readers to the translator’s mental workspace, following step by step the typical challenges encountered in professional assignments and the strategies used to address them. Using concrete examples, it presents legal translation as an exercise in controlled problem-solving—where the translator’s central ambition is a “safe passage to the opposite shore,” meaning a target text that functions properly in its new legal-linguistic environment.

Inside the United Nations Translation Environment
Chapter II moves into the distinctive world of legal translation at the United Nations, where multilingual production meets complex law-making, diplomacy, and institutional style. Drawing on first-hand experience, the chapter reviews the system’s performance in practice—highlighting both achievements and shortcomings, and examining why they occur. The discussion focuses on the recurring constraints of large-scale institutional translation: volume, time, consistency demands, and the tension between formal equivalence and communicative effectiveness.

International Criminal Law as a Case Study
In Chapter III, the lens widens to legal translation in international settings, using international criminal law (ICL) as the central example. The chapter recounts experience leading the team that translated the Lexsitus Commentary on the Law of the International Criminal Court (CLICC), with particular attention to collaboration between translators and subject-matter experts. By tracing how translation choices interact with specialist legal analysis, the chapter highlights a recurring theme of international legal work: terminology is never “just terminology,” but a gateway to doctrinal understanding.

Ethics Under Pressure—and in the Age of AI
Chapter IV addresses the ethical obligations of legal translators at a time when the profession is facing heightened pressure, including the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence tools. Rather than treating ethics as an abstract add-on, the chapter frames it as an operational requirement: decisions about uncertainty, traceability, intervention, and responsibility become sharper when technology changes workflows, expectations, and accountability structures.

Practical Appendices and a “Living” Book Model
The book’s appendices offer practical samples of translated legal texts—including two versions of the Rome Statute—along with selected “translator’s notes” originally provided in Arabic footnotes to Lexsitus-CLICC.