The paper features an interdisciplinary landscape of the complex topic of legal translation, successfully combining linguistics (both diachronic and synchronic), sociolinguistics, pragmalinguistics, intercultural communication and, last but not least, translation studies. Therefore, the investigation is carried out at the theoretical and applied level in order to derive an in-depth understanding of the multi-layered competence of the legal translator within the framework of the EU. The research hypotheses, validated throughout the paper, are centred around the need to define: the functional characteristics of legal language, more particularly, of English as a legal lingua franca at the level of the European Union; the evolution of English legal language in relation to translation effectiveness and efficiency; the status and dynamics of legal translation (perhaps, playing the most important role among specialised translation branches); the legal translators' competence (in line with the all-encompassing EMT framework); recurrent problems in the translation of legal texts (more precisely, our corpus-based approach involves directives on culture, media and audio-visual matters) alongside general lexical features and stylistic specificities of the texts in question, and the frequency rate of translation procedures used.