• Literary translation, French to English;
• Legal translation (documents, cases, articles, etc.), French to English;
• Business translation of any kind, French to English.

• Traductions litéraires;
• Toutes sortes de traductions légaux (documents, rapports des causes, articles, livres, etc.);
• Toutes sortes de traductions pour affaires, etc.

From the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the everyday language of British law continued to be French, just as it was the everyday language of the royal court. As the entrenched idiom of the conquered, English struggled manfully against Norman French, with the result that the law reports of the period preserve that curious dialect most safely called Law French. To quote another pointed aside from Pollock and Maitland, "To dignify with the name 'Norman-French' the mere 'dog-French' that we find in law reports of the sixteenth century is ridiculous." Probably the most notorious example of what brought on this dismissive tone is the 1621 report of the prisoner "condemne pur felony que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice que narrowly mist, et pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute & fix al Gibbet sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court."

[That is, he was "condemned for a felony and upon his condemnation threw a brickbat at the said justice, which narrowly missed, and for this Noy immediately drew up an indictment against the prisoner, and his right hand was chopped off and fixed to the gibbet where he himself was immediately hanged in the presence of the court."]

One could argue, without one's tongue entirely in one's cheek, that because such language is already bilingual, it needs no translation. But if we were to attempt a translation, a couple of alternatives come to mind -- alternatives which reflect the sort of choices the translator is obliged to make constantly, in even less trying circumstances. If the translator wanted to stay really true to the spirit of the fragment, he might simply "reverse out" everything, rendering the anglicisms into French and francisms into English: "the prisoner throw'd a pierre at the said justice which faillit de le frapper." The trouble, of course, is that this is painfully reminiscent of the joke that the correct translation of "hit the road" is "frapper la rue." But it has the virtue of showing how right Pollock and Maitland were about Law French, at least in its dying days.

A safer choice, probably, is simply to give the text as it is, then translate it into the target language -- "the prisoner threw a brickbat at the justice, and the missile narrowly missed him"; "le juge faillit être frappé par une pierre que le prisonnier avait jeté," or something like that. The wrong choice can invite yet more post-Conquest catastrophe. A 1637 translation of Conustable v. Clowbury, for example, reads:

Clow. fraights [loads his cargo on] the wife of Conustable, who covenants with Clow. that his wife shall go with the next wind to Calles; and Clow. covenants that if the wife shall go the intended voyage and return, &c, that he should pay to Conustable 200 pounds. And the plaintiff [Conustable] ... counts that the defendant ... does not shew nor averr that the wife did go with the next wind. The defendant pleads a special plea, and ... that the wife went with the next wind. ... [In other words: Clow. says that Conustable agreed to send his "wife" to sea loaded with Clow.'s cargo, but Conustable never lived up to the bargain and, instead, shipped his wife out only later. Conustable replies that in fact he shipped his wife out with Conustable's goods as soon as possible, namely, "with the next wind."]

Learned speculation has it that what the translator rendered in English as "wife" was the Law French niefe, which had two meanings: "wife of a villein or feudal serf" and "ship."
Some legal words that migrated into English are a direct result of such mistranslations. The history of culprit is graphic in this regard. When an accused person pled non culpabilis or, in Law French, nient culpable, not guilty, the Crown usually responded in Law French, "Culpable; prest [or prist] d'averrer nostre bille:" "We say the prisoner is guilty and we are ready to prove our indictment." The court clerk then would abbreviate the Crown's reply on the record as "Cul: prest" or "Cul: prist," meaning the Crown was formally ready to proceed. To verify this notation, the clerk next read it aloud, abbreviations and all, and put the accused to his election of method of trial: "Cul: prist. How wilt thou be tried?" As one commentator puts it, "this naturally induced the ignorant among the audience to suppose that culprit was an appellation given the prisoner" -- "Culprit! How will you be tried?" So much for the presumption of innocence. There never developed any direct French equivalent to culprit, never mind that the masses believed it was French, or Law French, in the first place. The word in French remained coupable, "the guilty person."