scholarly journals Helping the Translator Choose: The Concept of a Dictionary of Equivalents

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-363
Author(s):  
Weronika Szemińska
Keyword(s):  
Legal Systems ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Labelling System ◽  
Innovative Concept

Abstract The purpose of the article is to present the innovative concept of a dictionary of equivalents, a reference work designed specifically for translators of legal texts. The article describes the features of legal terminology which render legal translation particularly difficult, such as polysemy and synonymy as well as incongruence among legal systems. Then it proposes a classification and labelling system of equivalents which ought to be offered in a terminographic reference work for legal translators.

No creativity in legal translation?

Babel ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sieglinde E. Pommer
Keyword(s):  
Legal Systems ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Complex Problems ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
The Law

Whereas translating is generally considered to be a creative activity, mentioning this in the context of legal translation is, rather paradoxically, widely frowned upon despite the fact that the ­incongruency of legal systems makes finding exact equivalents particularly difficult in legal texts. Convinced that in fact translating the law requires taking insightful judgments, detecting interesting alternatives, coming up with novel ways to communicate ideas, and finding useful ­solutions to complex problems, the author examines the dynamic concept of creativity and redefines its meaning with regard to legal translation.

scholarly journals Legal Language and The Legal Translator

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Hanne Grøn
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
Conceptual Meaning

It is impossible to set up standards of translation performance and equivalence which will apply to any legal translation because the "languages of law" are as varied as the cases that reach the courts every day. Moreover, the translation of legal texts is often complicated by the lack of exact lexical equivalents in the TL's own legal system so that a transfer involves a high amount of "creative production". Obviously this production should be based on a profound extra-linguistic knowledge of both legal systems involved to avoid the pitfalls which the difference in conceptual meaning necessarily entails. Thus research into the TL's substantive law must be the first requirement in any legal translation context.

scholarly journals ZUR VERSTÄNDLICHKEIT VON ÜBERSETZUNGEN DEUTSCHER UND POLNISCHER GERICHTSBENENNUNGEN

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 65-84
Author(s):  
Paweł BIELAWSKI
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Law ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Literature ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Translation Techniques ◽  
Legal Communication

The focus of this paper is centered on the translation of German and Polish court names. Based on a thorough analysis of the translation terms used in legal literature and dictionaries, the author concludes that the court names are often being translated in a way that makes it impossible for the reader to correctly identify the institution in question, thus undermining the comprehensibility of the target texts significantly.Pointing to the differences between the court systems of Germany and Poland, the author contemplates whether the dissimilarities between two institutions from different legal systems need always to be marked in the translation. On the basis of the comparative law theory, the meaning features essential for both legal communication and legal translation are identified and presented.In the next part, the author examines how to translate the court names so that the institution at issue is instantly recognizable in the target text. As a result, three comprehensive translation techniques are proposed.The presented translation techniques shall contribute to improving the comprehensibility of legal texts, and constitute an alternative to the  descriptive translation of these institutions.

scholarly journals An Inventory of the Problems Related to Translating and Revising Legal Texts Issued by an African Court: A Case Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (7) ◽  
pp. 72-84
Author(s):  
Servais Martial Akpaca
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Term ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Lexical Approach ◽  
General Translation

The aim of this paper is to make an inventory of the problems that translators encounter when they translate the documents issued by a specific African human rights court. More specifically translating at the ACHPR requires the knowledge of legal language and familiarity with a particular type of legal texts as well as competence in human rights conventions and charters and general translation skills. In an attempt to address these issues, this paper adopts a threefold approach, namely a historical approach recalling some legal systems and traditions upheld by courts, a theoretical approach throwing light on some key concepts and a lexical approach that makes it possible to extract legal terms from texts issued by the court and match them with their equivalents in the target language. The result of this research work is that legal translation is a specialised area due to the legal terms and systems involved in it. Unlike other specialised areas where the link between the signifier and the signified is fixed, in legal translation, the signified may be inflected due to differences between legal systems. Finding an equivalent for a legal term in another legal system or in a target language may beat times difficult and even impossible.

scholarly journals SYNTACTIC AND LEXICAL ASPECTS OF STUDENTS’ LEGAL TRANSLATIONS AT THE POSTGRADUATE LEVEL

2020 ◽  
Vol XI (33) ◽  
pp. 189-205
Author(s):  
Igor Lakić
Keyword(s):  
Legal Systems ◽  
Undergraduate Level ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Study Programme ◽  
Postgraduate Level ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Free Translation ◽  
Causes Of Errors ◽  
Syntactic Differences ◽  
First Time

Teaching translation of legal texts into English at the postgraduate level at the Faculty of Philology (formerly at the Institute of Foreign Languages), University of Montenegro, started in 2004. At this study programme, students face for the first time challenges of translating legal texts. Although they occasionally translate some legal texts at the undergraduate level, this is the first time that they study legal translation in a systematic way. This certainly produces some challenges, that may be mainly observed on two levels: (1) syntactic level, where some students produce English sentences that are literal translations of Montenegrin sentences; bearing in mind syntactic differences in the languages, this sometimes leads to a loss of meaning or distorted meaning in translations; and (2) lexical level, where there are differences in the English and Montenegrin legal systems, which certainly requires caution in translation; it is possible to identify some inconsistencies in using legal terminology because some Montenegrin concepts cannot be always simply transferred into English without looking more deeply into the legal systems. The paper discusses the notions of formal fidelity vs. fidelity to the “uniform intent” of the text (Šarčević, 1997) or what Hatim and Munday (2004) refer to as literal and free translation. These notions are crucial for my discussion of causes of errors in my students’ translations.

scholarly journals Der Platz der juristischen Fachsprache in der Experten-Laien-Kommunikation

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (36) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Viola Heutger
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
The Eu

In this commentary, the author outlines possible contributions of a linguistic monitoring especially to the interpretive work of legal experts from the point of view of a lawyer. However, for such a monitoring to be efficient more efforts must be made from the part of the linguists to make clear what the specific methodological characteristics of a linguistic monitoring consist in. The article sees possible contribution in fields like interpreting legal texts in more languages like in the EU system, overcoming the differences of legal systems in international legal cooperation, and optimizing national legal texts produced on the basis of community legal texts in order to make them more accessible for national citizens.

scholarly journals The Role of Generic Competence and Professional Expertise in Legal Translation. The Case of English and Polish Probate Documents

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski
Keyword(s):  
Professional Community ◽  
Professional Expertise ◽  
Related Concept ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Deceased Person ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Texts

Abstract This paper seeks to demonstrate how the concept of generic competence (primarily intended for monolingual specialized communication) could be extended to address important issues in translating legal texts. First, generic competence is discussed against the backdrop of the related concept of translation competence. Then, a case study is presented which examines a closely related set of documents employed by the professional community of lawyers (represented by an English solicitor and Polish advocate) engaged in the specialist domain of probate law (legal process related to the estate of a deceased person). It is argued that both generic competence and professional expertise should be included in the range of competencies required for the translator of legal texts.

Legal Translation Studies as Interdiscipline: Scope and Evolution

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Prieto Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Translation Studies ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Current Position ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Professional Needs ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Further Development

This paper offers an overview of the development of Legal Translation Studies as a major interdiscipline within Translation Studies. It reviews key elements that shape its specificity and constitute the shared ground of its research community: object of study, place within academia, denomination, historical milestones and key approaches. This review elicits the different stages of evolution leading to the field’s current position and its particular interaction with Law. The focus is placed on commonalities as a means to identify distinctive reference points and avenues for further development. A comprehensive categorization of legal texts and the systematic scrutiny of contextual variables are highlighted as pivotal in defining the scope of the discipline and in proposing overarching conceptual and methodological models. Analyzing the applicability of these models and their impact on legal translation quality is considered a priority in order to reinforce interdisciplinary specificity in line with professional needs.

Hans-Heinrkh Vogel, Juridiska översättningar

Babel ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 180-185
Author(s):  
Klaus Rossenbeck
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Standard Work ◽  
Bilingual Dictionaries ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Problems ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Problems Of Translation ◽  
Main Ideas

This book would certainly become a standard work for the theory and practice of legal translation if it had been written in a more internationally accessible language than Swedish. In this review, the book's main ideas are presented more extensively than would otherwise be necessary so that those readers who do not have a good command of Swedish can form an idea of the work's merits. The book treats, with great competence, the following problems: Linguistic and legal problems connected to international agreements that exist in different authentic versions or in a language that is not that of the parties who are making the agreement; quality control of legal translations, especialy those in Sweden; the translation of general language vocabulary that is found in legal texts; the question of equivalence relationships in the translation of legal terms; the translation of culturally bound vocabulary; translation of names of different courts, authorities and organizations; problems in the translation of designations for different crimes as well as for legal terms with ideological connotations; linguistic limitations within any given language due to incongruities in certain terms that are used not only within the context of national law but also within international law. The book's theoretical commentaries are characterized by balance and are accompanied by a great deal of useful advice for solving practical problems of translation. This reviewer would like to see better bilingual dictionaries that are based on complete and thorough comparative analyses of legal systems and that are of the same type as that which Vogel has carried out using only a limited number of examples.

scholarly journals The problematic of translation of legal texts

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-71
Author(s):  
Natalia Kurchinskaya-Grasso
Keyword(s):  
International Criminal ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Procedural Law ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Profound Knowledge ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
The One ◽  
General Linguistic

This article explores the translation of legal texts, as it is usually fraught with a variety of challenges of linguistic and extralinguistic nature. The translator must have a strong command of linguistics, translation skills and profound knowledge of national and international criminal-procedural of civil-procedural law.  Focus is made on the one hand on determination of typology of general linguistic and translation problems pertaining to legal documents, and on the other – on identification of peculiarities of these problems depending on qualification of a specialist doing legal translation. The main characteristics of legal texts are viewed from the perspective of applied comparative legal science. Interdisciplinary approach towards research in the area of legal translation is a logical solution for the analysis of emerging problems. The article demonstrates some mistakes in translation of legal terms on the example of English, Polish, and Italian languages. The author comes to the conclusion that for a translator without the background of legal practice it is difficult to do the translation of legal texts; as well as submits a proposal on comprising methodological recommendations.

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