Legal translation

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Complexity of legal translation Complexity-legal-translation.jpg
Complexity of legal translation

Legal translation is the translation of language used in legal settings and for legal purposes. Legal translation may also imply that it is a specific type of translation only used in law, which is not always the case. As law is a culture-dependent subject field, legal translation is not necessarily linguistically transparent. Intransparency in translation can be avoided somewhat by use of Latin legal terminology, where possible, but in non-western languages debates are centered on the origins and precedents of specific terms, such as in the use of particular Chinese characters in Japanese legal discussions. [1]

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Intransparency can lead to expensive misunderstandings in terms of a contract, for example, resulting in avoidable lawsuits. Legal translation is thus usually done by specialized law translators. Conflicts over the legal impact of a translation can be avoided by indicating that the text is "authentic" i.e. legally operative on its own terms or instead is merely a "convenience translation", which itself is not legally operative. Courts only apply authentic texts and do not rely on "convenience" translations in adjudicating rights and duties of litigants.

Source text and target text

Most legal writing is exact and technical, seeking to precisely define legally binding rights and duties. Thus, precise correspondence of these rights and duties in the source text and in the translation is essential. As well as understanding and precisely translating the legal rights and duties established in the translated text, legal translators must also bear in mind the legal system of the source text (ST) and the legal system of the target text (TT) which may differ greatly from each other. [2] This is a challenge because it requires that the translator have substantial legal knowledge as well as the multiple legal systems that can exist in one language. [2] Examples of different legal systems include Anglo-American common law, Islamic law, or customary tribal law for examples.

Apart from terminological lacunae (lexical gaps), textual conventions in the source language are often culture-dependent and may not correspond to conventions in the target culture (see e.g. Nielsen 2010). Linguistic structures that are often found in the source language may have no direct equivalent structures in the target language. The translator therefore has to be guided by certain standards of linguistic, social and cultural equivalence between the language used in the source text (ST) to produce a text (TT) in the target language. Those standards correspond to a variety of different principles defined as different approaches to translation in translation theory. Each of the standards sets a certain priority among the elements of ST to be preserved in TT. For example, following the functional approach, translators try to find target language structures with the same functions as those in the source language thus value the functionality of a text fragment in ST more than, say, the meanings of specific words in ST and the order in which they appear there.


Translation issues

The usage of transcription in the context of linguistic discussions has been controversial. Typically, two kinds of linguistic records are considered to be scientifically relevant. First, linguistic records of general acoustic features, and secondly, records that only focuses on the distinctive phonemes of a language. While transcriptions are not entirely illegitimate, transcriptions without enough detailed commentary regarding any linguistic features used has a great chance of the content being misinterpreted. [3] An example that highlights this complication with transcription is displaying dialect in writing. The fundamental problem with this situation is that the transcribed product is not simply a spoken language in its written form, but a language the transcriber is responsible for writing down and a language that has been transcribed by someone other than the speaker, no matter the level of understanding the transcriber has for the spoken language. It is important to note that any transcription is an interpretation of the speech no matter how detailed it is, and will be selective in what it includes or leave out. [4] Because of this reason, it is important to strategically choose the form of transcription in order to properly represent the spoken language in a written form. [4]

Different approaches to translation should not be confused with different approaches to translation theory. The former are the standards used by translators in their trade while the latter are just different paradigms used in developing translation theory. Few jurists are familiar with terms of translation theory. They may ask interpreters and translators to provide verbatim translation. They often view this term as a clear standard of quality that they desire in TT. However, verbatim translation usually is undesirable due to different grammar structures as well as different legal terms or rules in different legal systems. When it comes to translating, it can be difficult to find the correct words to translate the same information given because not all words that are translated can have the same meaning. There are many cultures around the world that the legal translation has to be exact. It is important that Legal Translators be able to interpret one word from a given language to another while still being able to maintain the same impact and meaning of the legal word. [5]

Bilingual law dictionaries

Legal translators often consult specialized bilingual or polyglot law dictionaries. Care should be taken, as some bilingual law dictionaries are of poor quality and their use may lead to mistranslation. Bilingual legal dictionaries tend to largely be a source of reference for interpretation, rather than a source of literal equivalent translations of legal terminology. Translating legal text from one language to another becomes a challenge for legal experts because there is a level of freedom to translating texts that retain meaning and not necessarily maintaining equivalent semantic structure. There is also a debate between experts to either restrict the legal language to the target text for professional use or to broaden legal language for the use and comprehension of the public, specifically in societies with bilingual law system. [6]

See also


Related Research Articles

A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”. Individual words are handled by terminology bases and are not within the domain of TM.

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of spoken language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parallel text</span> Text placed alongside its translation or translations

A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Library are two examples of dual-language series of texts. Reference Bibles may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study; Origen's Hexapla placed six versions of the Old Testament side by side. A famous example is the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery allowed the Ancient Egyptian language to begin being deciphered.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloss (annotation)</span> Brief marginal notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text

A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different.

Terminology is a group of specialized words and respective meanings in a particular field, and also the study of such terms and their use; the latter meaning is also known as terminology science. A term is a word, compound word, or multi-word expressions that in specific contexts is given specific meanings—these may deviate from the meanings the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language. Terminology is a discipline that studies, among other things, the development of such terms and their interrelationships within a specialized domain. Terminology differs from lexicography, as it involves the study of concepts, conceptual systems and their labels (terms), whereas lexicography studies words and their meanings.

Computer-aided translation (CAT), also referred to as computer-assisted translation or computer-aided human translation (CAHT), is the use of software to assist a human translator in the translation process. The translation is created by a human, and certain aspects of the process are facilitated by software; this is in contrast with machine translation (MT), in which the translation is created by a computer, optionally with some human intervention.

Legal lexicography is the complex of activities concerned with the development of theories and principles for the design, compilation, use, and evaluation of dictionaries within the field of law, see e.g. Nielsen 1994.

Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology.

Cultural translation is the practice of translation while respecting and showing cultural differences. This kind of translation solves some issues linked to culture, such as dialects, food or architecture.

Linguistic categories include

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Translation</span> Transfer of the meaning of something in one language into another

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction between translating and interpreting ; under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.

Technical translation is a type of specialized translation involving the translation of documents produced by technical writers, or more specifically, texts which relate to technological subject areas or texts which deal with the practical application of scientific and technological information. While the presence of specialized terminology is a feature of technical texts, specialized terminology alone is not sufficient for classifying a text as "technical" since numerous disciplines and subjects which are not "technical" possess what can be regarded as specialized terminology. Technical translation covers the translation of many kinds of specialized texts and requires a high level of subject knowledge and mastery of the relevant terminology and writing conventions.

Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The modern-day scientific study of linguistics takes all aspects of language into account — i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

Rule-based machine translation is machine translation systems based on linguistic information about source and target languages basically retrieved from dictionaries and grammars covering the main semantic, morphological, and syntactic regularities of each language respectively. Having input sentences, an RBMT system generates them to output sentences on the basis of morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis of both the source and the target languages involved in a concrete translation task.

Skopos theory, a theory in the field of translation studies, employs the prime principle of a purposeful action that determines a translation strategy. The intentionality of a translational action stated in a translation brief, the directives, and the rules guide a translator to attain the expected target text translatum.

Multimedia translation, also sometimes referred to as Audiovisual translation, is a specialized branch of translation which deals with the transfer of multimodal and multimedial texts into another language and/or culture. and which implies the use of a multimedia electronic system in the translation or in the transmission process.

memoQ is a proprietary computer-assisted translation software suite which runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is developed by the Hungarian software company memoQ Fordítástechnológiai Zrt., formerly Kilgray, a provider of translation management software established in 2004 and cited as one of the fastest-growing companies in the translation technology sector in 2012 and 2013. memoQ provides translation memory, terminology, machine translation integration and reference information management in desktop, client/server and web application environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sketch Engine</span> Corpus manager and text analysis software

Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in 90+ languages.

<i>Yiqiejing yinyi</i> (Xuanying) Chinese dictionary of Buddhism

The Yiqiejing yinyi is the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary of Buddhist technical terminology, and was the archetype for later Chinese bilingual dictionaries. This specialized glossary was compiled by the Tang dynasty lexicographer monk Xuanying (玄應), who was a translator for the famous pilgrim and Sanskritist monk Xuanzang. When Xuanying died he had only finished 25 chapters of the dictionary, but another Tang monk Huilin (慧琳) compiled an enlarged 100-chapter version with the same title, the (807) Yiqiejing yinyi.

References

  1. Mizuno, Makiko (2018). "Linguistic Study of Court Interpreting in Lay Judge Trials in Japan". In Hebert, David G. (ed.). International Perspectives on Translation, Education and Innovation in Japanese and Korean Societies. Cham: Springer. pp. 207–222. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-68434-5_14. ISBN   978-3-319-68432-1.
  2. 1 2 Sandrini, Peter (2018). Languages for Special Purposes: An International Handbook. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. p. 554. ISBN   978-3-11-022800-7.
  3. Heffner, R.-M. S. (1934). "Concerning Transcription". Language. 10 (3): 286–290. doi:10.2307/409478. ISSN   0097-8507. JSTOR   409478.
  4. 1 2 Macaulay, Ronald K. S. (1991). ""Coz It Izny Spelt When They Say It": Displaying Dialect in Writing". American Speech. 66 (3): 280–291. doi:10.2307/455800. ISSN   0003-1283. JSTOR   455800.
  5. Gotti, Maurizio (2016). "Linguistic Features of Legal Texts: Translation Issues". Statute Law Review. 37 (2): 144–155. doi:10.1093/slr/hmu027. ISSN   0144-3593.
  6. Poon, Wai Yee Emily (2010). "Strategies for Creating a Bilingual Legal Dictionary". International Journal of Lexicography. 23 (1): 83–103. doi:10.1093/ijl/ecp037. ISSN   0950-3846.

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