This book is the first volume of the publication on Legal Language, Legal Discourse: Variation and Beyond, edited by Panagiotis G. Krimpas and Lelija Sočanac. It contains ten chapters on legal language and/or discourse issues with particular focus on legal translation’s interlingual, intersystemic and/or intersemiotic aspects. Legal translation is undoubtedly the most demanding field of translation in both theory and practice, and modern juritranslatology utilises methods and insights from a wide range of other fields, a fact reflected in the variety of topics covered in this book, ranging from quantitative and qualitative corpus-based methods, legal comparison, contrastive and historical-terminological approaches, comparative conceptual analysis, comparative componential analysis and discourse analysis to traditional descriptive perspectives, discussed through the lens of contemporary approaches and research methods. The book will be useful primarily for academics, linguists, legal translators and lawyers, and it can also provide additional reading for students of law, legal linguistics and/or legal translation.

Panagiotis G. Krimpas is full professor of Terminology, Translation and Legal Texts at the Department of Humanities, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. He has practiced law (2001–2017) and regularly collaborated, as an expert in legal translation/terminology, with Greek governmental institutions (2013–2025), including the Prime Minister’s Office (2013–2015) and the Diplomatic Cabinet of the President of the Republic (2015–2020). He is a founding and former BoD member of the Hellenic Society for Translation Studies, a BoD member of the Hellenic Society for Terminology and speaks fifteen languages. His research interests include legal linguistics, historical linguistics, and dialectology.

Lelija Sočanac is retired full professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She was head of the Foreign Language Department and head of the Centre for Language and Law at the same institution, where she was involved in legal-linguistic research, organisation of conferences, curriculum development and implementation of language courses for lawyers, and development of new language teaching methods and materials. Her research interests include legal linguistics, contact linguistics, (historical) sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.