This chapter investigates legal translation and the challenges translators will have to face to ensure plain meaning in law. It has long been recognized that legal translation – the creation of equivalent texts in different languages – poses a series of challenges to the translator, some grounded in the nature of language, some in the relationship of language to culture, and some inherent in the nature of language use within the domain of law. This chapter explores some of those challenges in the context of developing norms of legal translation used within the European Union and Chinese legal systems. It also suggests that a careful examination of the processes through which legal transplants are assimilated into national legal cultures shows that the theoretical problems inherent in legal translation are also at play in the reception of legal transplants.