This paper documents the approach I followed in the translation into Italian of a normative text, the Rules of procedure of the Lower House of the Netherlands,
for publication by the Italian Chamber of Deputies. I first try to characterize the
source text as a token of the legal and normative genre; I then look briefly at the
literature on legal translation and suggest that the debate on translation
techniques to be applied to legal translation could be subsumed in the more
general debate on the ethics of translation. I submit that not all legal translation
should necessarily strive for equivalent legal effect in the target system and that
the distinction between documentary and instrumental translation strategies is
relevant for this task. The second part of the paper looks at how a documentary
strategy can be pursued at the level of structure, syntax and lexis with reference
to the languages involved, leading to a target text that is still marked as foreign
but recognizable as belonging to the Italian legal genre.
