Welcome to the Centre for Legal Translation and Documentation at the University of Ottawa

In 1981, students registered in the brand new French Common Law Program at the University of Ottawa and francophone lawyers in Ontario had practically no tools for working in their language. This was the beginning of common law in French in Canada, and this is why AJEFO approached the University of Ottawa to establish a not-for-profit organization tasked with creating the tools that were lacking. The result was that in September 1981, Roger Guindon, Rector of the University of Ottawa, and Robert Paris, President of the AJEFO, announced the creation of the Centre for Legal Translation and Documentation. The Centre was the product of the combined efforts of the AJEFO and the Common Law and Civil Law Sections of the Faculty of Law, with the help of the School of Translation and Interpretation (STI) of the University of Ottawa, the Centre’s partners.

In addition to doing work supported by the Support Fund, the CLTD offers translation and legal writing services to the legal community as a whole on a fee-for-service basis, and also provides documentation services and terminology information free of charge. Through its use of information technology and its highly specialized lawyer-linguists, the CLTD has done important work and produced a long list of publications in the field of common law in French over the years.