An Approach to Legal Translation

Abstract

Legal translators rely on translatorial procedures and practices that are not so widely different from the ones used in general translation practice. However, due to the distinctive quality of legal texts, and to the high incidence of extra-linguistic issues, the legal translator frequently has to adopt special strategies to suit the specificity of legal translation problems. Legal translation encounters two major obstacles: the first one refers to the differences in the legal systems, and the second one to the differences in the linguistic system. The paper presents an analysis of the nature of law that considerably influences the process of translating legal texts, as well as a set of ‘dedicated’ strategies to cope with the difficulties of legal translation.

Keywords

• law system
• legal text
• specific terminology
• equivalence
• strategy