Treaty interpretation, multilinguism, and the WTO dispute settlement system: towards the comparative translation paradigm?

Abstract

Abstract Despite a growing emphasis on the interpretive methods employed by international courts and tribunals driven by their potential to address the issue of international law fragmentation, the multilingual aspect of interpretation, codified in Article 33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), has received the least amount of attention from international lawyers. However, the multilingual complexity, rarely found in national legal systems, is precisely one of the reasons why scholars of legal interpretation are fascinated by international law. Based on a critical review of the VCLT approach to the interpretation of multilingual treaties, this work argues for an alternative approach, which we refer to as the ‘comparative translation’ paradigm. In addition to putting forward a normative case in favour of this alternative approach, we also aim to show how the World Trade Organization dispute settlement organs have started, at least to some extent, to embrace the new paradigm