Definition
In law, "translate" carries a specialized meaning distinct from its modern primary usage. In English legal usage, particularly ecclesiastical and historical property law, to translate means to transfer — to move a person, right, or property from one status, position, or jurisdiction to another.
1. Ecclesiastical law: To transfer a bishop or other church official from one see or diocese to another. This was a formal act requiring appropriate authority and had legal consequences for the powers and obligations of the office.
2. Historical property and conveyancing: To transfer title, possession, or an interest in property from one party to another. Used broadly in older English legal writing to describe the movement of legal interests.
3. Modern legal usage: In contemporary practice, "translate" appears almost exclusively in the linguistic sense — rendering documents, testimony, or evidence from one language into another for use in legal proceedings. This is its dominant meaning in modern courts, administrative agencies, and international legal instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To change spoken words or written text from one language into another; to render meaning across linguistic boundaries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To bear, carry, or remove from one place to another; to transfer. Also: to remove to heaven without natural death. Labeled archaic by 1913.
Editorial note: The gap here runs in an unusual direction. Modern common usage has narrowed sharply to the linguistic sense, while the historical legal meaning was closer to the now-archaic general sense of physical or formal transfer. A researcher encountering "translate" in pre-nineteenth-century legal texts should resist the instinct to read it as having anything to do with language — it almost certainly means "transfer."
Common Confusion
The word presents a near-perfect false friend across time. In a modern legal document, "translate" almost always means linguistic conversion. In a pre-nineteenth-century English legal text, it almost always means transfer or conveyance of a right, title, or person to a new position. Conflating these will produce nonsensical readings of historical sources. The ecclesiastical sense (translating a bishop) survived longer in formal legal usage than the property sense, but both are obsolete in American law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat "translate" as a term requiring period-sensitivity. In sources predating the mid-nineteenth century — particularly English ecclesiastical records, early conveyancing treatises, and canon law materials — the word signals a transfer of legal status or property interest, not a linguistic act. Burrill's entry is sparse but pointed: the sole definition is "to transfer," with a single citation to Hale's Analysis of the Law. This signals that the term was already receding from active legal vocabulary by the time Burrill compiled his dictionary, surviving mainly as a term of art in ecclesiastical proceedings.
For researchers examining bishop appointments, cathedral records, or early church court materials, the "translation" of a bishop was a formal legal event — not a casual reassignment — with implications for succession of authority and property rights attached to the see. Ecclesiastical law sources will use "translated to" a diocese in a way that carries the same legal weight as a deed of transfer.
In modern legal research, "translate" and "translation" are almost entirely procedural: the accuracy of court interpreters, the admissibility of translated documents, and the duties of certified translators under evidence rules and due process doctrine. These two bodies of law — historical transfer and modern linguistic conversion — share a word but nothing else.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill (the sole historical dictionary source available here) defines the term simply as "to transfer" under English law, citing Hale's Analysis of the Law, section xxxiii. The entry is unusually compressed even by Burrill's standards, suggesting the term was already treated as self-explanatory within ecclesiastical and conveyancing contexts rather than as a term requiring extended analysis.
Webster's 1913 preserves the archaic general sense independently, labeling the "carry or remove" meaning as archaic and offering illustrative quotations from Dryden and Evelyn that confirm the term's old resonance with physical movement — including the theologically charged sense of being "translated to heaven" without dying. The convergence between Webster's archaic English sense and Burrill's legal definition is instructive: the legal usage was always the formal register of what was once common English, and both fell out of active use roughly in parallel.
No other historical law dictionaries are represented in the available source material for this entry. Researchers should note that more complete coverage would likely be found in legal dictionaries with stronger ecclesiastical law sections, such as Mozley & Whiteley or Cowell's Interpreter for the earlier period.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Ecclesiastical Law (for translation of bishops and church officials); Property Transfer and Conveyancing (for historical usage in transfer of title).