Academic literature on the topic 'Legal translation'

The aim of the present article is to provide an overview of the main difficulties encountered by legal translators, and work out some practical solutions so that the translator could provide an adequate translation in compliance with the norms of the target legal system. Legal translations raise very complex theoretical and practical problems and, therefore, an interdisciplinary comparative approach to the two legal systems and languages should be manifested by specialized translators. This study demonstrates that despite the common assumption that legal translations are literal, they may be translated differently depending on the context and aim of its translation. When translating a legal document, one is thus faced with the challenge of providing a translation that makes a legal as well as linguistic sense. Consequently, a translator can provide an accurate translation only if he/she has an understanding of the SL and the TL legal systems.

The aim of the present article is to provide an overview of the main difficulties encountered by legal translators, and work out some practical solutions so that the translator could provide an adequate translation in compliance with the norms of the target legal system. Legal translations raise very complex theoretical and practical problems and, therefore, an interdisciplinary comparative approach to the two legal systems and languages should be manifested by specialized translators. This study demonstrates that despite the common assumption that legal translations are literal, they may be translated differently depending on the context and aim of its translation. When translating a legal document, one is thus faced with the challenge of providing a translation that makes a legal as well as linguistic sense. Consequently, a translator can provide an accurate translation only if he/she has an understanding of the SL and the TL legal systems.

For many years translation theorists have discussed the degree of translational freedom a legal translator has in rendering the meaning of a legal source text in a translation. Some believe that in order to achieve the communicative purpose, legal translators should focus on readability and bias their translation towards the target language community. Others insist that because of the special nature of legal texts and the sometimes binding force of legal translations, translators should stay as close to the source text as possible, i.e., bias their translation towards the source language community. But what is the relationship between these ‘academic’ observations and the way professional users and producers, i.e., lawyers and translators, think of legal translation? This article examines how actors on the Danish legal translation market view translational manoeuvres that result in a more or less close relationship between a legal source text and its translation, and also the translator’s power to decide what the nature of this relationship should be and how it should manifest itself in the translation.

The article deals with the issue on translating legal terms from Ukrainian into English on the basis of a case study of a newly-coined term in Ukrainian legislation – 'maloznachna sprava'. The relevance of the topic of legal translation from English into Ukrainian and vice versa has become especially acute in light of the Ukraine-EU approximation agreement. While the introduction of simplified civil proceedings is itself a step towards the approximation of Ukrainian legislation to the EU, the next stage will inevitably be comparing and contrasting the existing terms within the Ukrainian and EU civil procedures. Ukrainian simplified procedure aims at considering insignificant cases (Ukr. – 'maloznachni spravy') in a speedy manner, while EU accelerated and simplified civil procedure uses the term 'small claims' for cases with a claim value for up to EUR 5,000. Obviously, these notions are not equivalent, but their meaning overlaps, creating pitfalls for translation. Thus, for proper translation, it is important to specify how the concept of small claims fits into Ukraine's national context. The notion of insignificant cases illustrates the relevance of the linguistic study of legal translations, as well as a need for the consolidation of practical achievements in the field of translation of legal discourse and, in particular, legal neologisms. The purpose of legal translation is to create a text that will be interpreted in the same way by legal professionals in the target legal system as it would be in the original legal system. The aim of translation is not to erase linguistic and cultural differences but to accommodate them, fully and unapologetically. The challenge is to convey the legal text as a fragment of a living legal system. When translating, a translator should strive for equivalence, bearing in mind the harmonisation and approximation of terminologies. The linguistic approximation of national Ukrainian legal terms to the EU terminology should be carefully considered to avoid their misinterpretation with the supranatural terms. The author emphasises the necessity to perform concept analysis between the terms in the EU and Ukraine simplified procedures and comes to the conclusion that despite having surface similarity to the EU term 'small claim', the Ukrainian term 'maloznachna sprava' is, in fact, a much wider concept. A range of translations of legal neologisms are described in the article, and the need to use a literal translation of the term is substantiated. As a result of the analysis of possible translation options and the ECtHR translation precedent, it is recommended that the term 'maloznachna sprava' should be translated as 'insignificant case' within the sphere of Ukrainian civil procedure. Keywords: legal translation, Ukrainian-English translation, small claim, insignificant case.

Abstract This article proposes a hierarchy of translator and reviser competences in prototypical scenarios in legal translation with a view to determining the most appropriate revision foci to ensure translation quality. Built on a prior characterisation of the most common professional translator profiles in legal translation, the proposal for a hierarchy of competences derives from two premises: (1) The professional profile of those who translate and revise legal documents is very diverse in terms of competence and qualifications (training and experience), and (2) translation competence and specialist knowledge in legal fields (i.e., domain competence) are fundamental when revising to guarantee the quality of legal translations. The proposal is framed by quality assurance in legal translation through a revision process based on (1) the coherent management of the work of the translators and revisers involved in the translation project, and (2) the appropriate methodology for revision applied to legal translation by adapting the revision mode’s focus to ensure its effectiveness. Six common scenarios are identified in light of the translators’ profiles, for which revisers’ profiles are then proposed in order to detect any legal translation competence deficiencies among translators, and thus ensure quality.

The translation of legal information constitutes a special branch of translation practice, particularly due to the systemic nature of legal terminology, as well as complicated syntax and the use of fixed word associations and language templates. Professional human translators have always been the preferred way to translate legal documents because they have the linguistic expertise, a good understanding of the cultural context and capacity to make decisions when translating. As more and more international companies enter new markets, the need for translating legal texts increases, which often involves large amounts of data that need to be translated quickly. The possibilities and limits of machine translation (MT) are being frequently tested. Since the legal sector traditionally requires high-quality translations, the question arises whether machine translation can also work well in this field?

The translation of legal documents – not a new field in translation practice or theoretical discourse – gained a new dimension for translators’ work in Latvia when, after restoring independence, the country was reintegrated into international processes and organizations. Consequently, the development of legal text translation competence has also become an important task in the study programs related to translation of LSP texts. Against this background, the paper addresses some of the issues of understanding and interpreting legislation in the translation situation, with a particular focus on working with the functions and implications of sentence syntax. This part of the work provides the translator with the opportunity to find not only successful grammatical solutions in the target language sentences, but above all, a prerequisite for understanding the meaning of the source text. For the purposes of the study, the relevant aspects are briefly outlined in a theoretical context by focusing on the specific features of legal texts and the competence-related requirements for translators; it also includes an analysis of examples based on both published translations of legislation and the typical problems encountered in student translations. The study leads to several conclusions. Accuracy (also with regard to interpretation), an element of the general concepts of equivalence/adequacy, stands out as a specific aspect and criterion of legal text translation quality; it is necessary to ensure that the meaning of terms is not broadened or narrowed and that the applicability or explicit/implicit attitude is not altered – translations of a number of units and elements tend to be almost literal. The practice of translating legal texts generally requires that target texts be rendered as consistently as possible, which to a large extent implies an almost literal relationship with the source text; any changes need explicit justification. A specific aspect of translators’ competence is the examination undertaken during the pre-translation phase to determine the applicability of the relevant legal provisions and select the most appropriate sources of information. An important prerequisite for a quality translation is understanding the essence of the source sentence.

Abstract Axiomatically, translation is twofold: an activity/process (more accurately designated by the term translating) and a product (the term translation can be restricted to the product). It seems that the product dimension has gained increased importance, being the most visible part of translation as market-driven, design-oriented, precise and measurable - complying with specifications. Translation engenders a sequence: identification of text type and of end users’ needs (experts or non-experts in the field), evaluation of the complexity of the source text via global reading, followed by a close reading of its parts, the translating of the document, the translator’s checking of final version, editing and proofreading. The translator’s choices are accountable in point of cost-effectiveness (efficiency) and effectiveness. Therefore, the legal translator should master the methodological toolkit, conceptual frame and related terminology, and adopt an inward-looking perspective (intuition, subjectivity, ingrained habits, insights deriving from his/her expertise and experience) alongside an outward-looking one (working against objective criteria, standards of quality, benchmarks, etc).

Legal translation of contract agreements is a challenge to translators as it involves combining the literary translation with the technical terminological precision. In translating legal contract agreements, a legal translator must utilize the lexical or syntactic precision and, more importantly, the pragmatic awareness of the context. This will guarantee an overall communicative process and avoid inconsistency in legal translation. However, the inability of the translator to meet these two functions in translating the contract item not only affects the contractors’ comprehension of the contract item but also affects the parties’ contractual obligations. In light of this, the purpose of this study was to find out how legal collocations used in contract agreements are translated from Arabic into English by student-translators in terms of (1) purely technical, (2) semi-technical, and (3) everyday vocabulary collocations. For the data collection, a multiple-choice collocation test was used to be answered by 35 EFL Iraqi undergraduate translator-students to decide on the aspects of weaknesses and strengths of their translation, thus decide on the aspects of correction. The findings showed that these students had serious problems in translating legal collocations as they lack the linguistic knowledge and pragmatic awareness needed to achieve the legal meaning and effect. They were also unable to make a difference among the three categories of legal collocations, purely technical, semi-technical, and everyday vocabulary collocations. These students should be exposed to more legal translation practices to obtain the required experience needed for their future career.

The present study aims to provide a contrastive analysis of Arabic-English translation of ten legal texts with an eye to evaluating the accuracy of the translation. The researcher collected the data from El-Farahaty’s (2015) Arabic–English–Arabic Legal Translation. A contrastive analysis was developed to assess the accuracy of the translation of the legal texts selected. The examination of the source legal texts and the translations provided either by the authoress of the book herself or the sources from which she collected them revealed serious errors such as overtranslation, omission of translating important words in the source texts, wrong choice of equivalents in the target language, gloss translation, punctuation mistakes in the target texts and grammatical mistakes in the target texts. Further research on the assessment of Arabic-English translation of legal texts is required to encourage professional legal translators and scholars to approach legal translation more professionally and responsibly.