Reglament Arbitrazhnogo Instituta Stokgol'mskoi Torgovoi Palaty

Abstract

Recent Soviet economic reforms promise to extend the right to engage directly in foreign trade transactions to thousands of Soviet enterprises and organisations. This change means that Soviet managers and their legal counsel who were brought up in domestic Soviet trade will now be dealing in foreign trade. Some of the newcomers to the foreign trade scene will not have the fluent knowledge of English that characterised the few Soviet specialists allowed to engage in foreign trade in the pre-Gorbachev period. Thus the provision of Russian-language versions of rules of international arbitration institutions can serve an important practical need. Economic restructuring is not limited to the Soviet Union, however. The dreaded phenomenon of ‘marketing’ has emerged not only in law practice, but also in international arbitration. It must be, to use one of Pravda's favourite phrases, ‘no accident’ that the Russian translation of the Stockholm Rules appeared with lightning speed after the publication of the draft Russian translation of the Rules of the London Court of International Arbitration. This healthy competition is leading to a dramatic increase in translation quality. The translation reviewed here is definitely better than the English translations that Soviet arbitration tribunals publish of their own arbitration rules. However, technical accuracy is not enough for a translation. The translator must understand a difficult legal text and must make hard choices when no word in the target language exactly matches the source language. The first choice that faced the translator was whether to use the genitive case or the adjectival form of ‘Stockholm’ in the title of the brochure. Either would serve perfectly to reflect the meaning of the English text. The translator avoided the dilemma of Buridan's ass by choosing the genitive form for the front cover and the adjectival form for the title page.2 The …