Tricky Terms In Legal Translation from and to English: Stepping up to the Classroom Challenge

Abstract

Legal translation competence includes a high number of sub-competences that legal translation trainees need to master. Therefore, trainers may have no time to tackle issues at the very micro level that are challenging not only for legal translation trainees, but sometimes even for professional translators. Although many such issues are identified in legal translation textbooks, the prevailing holistic approach to teaching legal translation may have led to such issues being sidelined in the legal translation classroom. Drawing on the author’s experience as a legal translation trainer, this paper attempts to fill this vacuum and offer a systematic approach to addressing at least some of these phenomena. A selection of tricky terms will be presented, together with practical activities designed to raise trainees’ awareness of such issues and teach them how to approach them confidently when translating from and to English. Four groups of terms are covered: false friends in general and legal language; vague terms such as good and reasonable; non-transparent terms where complex legal meaning is packed into a simple term (constructive, in lieu of), and enantiosemous terms (apparent, qualified). It is believed that when such phenomena are tackled in isolation, trainees may become better equipped to deal with them successfully the next time they encounter them in an English source text or to use them actively when translating into English.

Keywords

• legal language
• non-transparent terms
• tricky legal terms
• false friends
• legal translation training
• vagueness