This special issue of Parallèles contains revised versions of papers presented at an international workshop held at the University of Mainz in Germersheim. It deals with the historical, theoretical and practical aspects of legal language and legal translation. Legal translation is not a new topic in translation studies. Since the 1990s, there have been a number of important publications, including research-based monographs offering different perspectives on legal translation (e.g., Šarčević, 1997; Wiesmann, 2004; Griebel, 2013), edited volumes and conference proceedings (e.g., Sandrini, 1999; Schena & Snel Trampus, 2000; Prieto Ramos, 2018), special issues of journals (e.g., Schwab, 2002; Lane-Mercier et al., 2014; Dullion & Prieto Ramos, 2018) and textbooks (e.g., Gémar, 1995; Bocquet, 2008; Stolze, 2014). The relationship between legal language and the translation of legal texts, which is one of the main topics of this special issue, was an early topic of discussion in the field of translation studies (see, e.g., the two volumes of Gémar, 1995) but has only recently garnered attention within the context of legal linguistics. The classical introduction by Cornu, Linguistique juridique(1990), does not address problems of translation in depth. However, the manual Handbuch Sprache im Recht (Felder & Vogel, 2017), published 27 years later, contains several articles on multilingualism, translation and interpreting, and Lectures on Legal Linguistics by Galdia (2017) includes chapters dedicated to legal translation and legal interpreting. Moreover, the recent establishment of large multilingual corpora has enabled us to analyse plurilingual legal linguistic features and research questions within legal translation studies through a wider lens (Mori, 2018; Cavagnoli & Mori, 2019; Prieto Ramos, 2019). Therefore, progress has been made, but there is still room for closer cooperation between translation scholars and legal linguists. Another topic that plays an important role in this special issue and that remains under-researched is the history of legal translation. Šarčević (1997) provides an overview of this topic in chapter two of her ground-breaking monograph. However, comprehensive case studies, such those by Cáceres Würsig (2004) or Dullion (2007),remain scarce.