К вопросу о специфике юридического перевода (на материале немецкого, французского и испанского языков)

Abstract

Legal terms are not uniform at the international level, but they are closely connected with a national legal system. This implies serious conceptual inconsistencies. The above-mentioned systemic connection leads to the fact that either boundaries of terms’ meanings belonging to different jurisdictions or the degree of their explication may vary. Despite some similarities in legal systems, primarily of European countries, each state has its own legal order, conceptual and terminological systems, specific legal rules, forms and procedures of judicial proceedings. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main causes of difficulties in translation of legal terminology from German, French and Spanish languages. To achieve this goal, the following tasks have been set in the research: to analyze the specifics of legal language and of legal documents translation as well as the issues of equivalency in legal translation; to select the samples from the above-mentioned languages that clearly demonstrate difficulties in translation of texts from such branches as civil and criminal law, administrative and civil codes, etc. The problems a translator faces due to the socio-cultural content of legal terms can be solved by means of various resources. As research methods the authors have used the method of comparison, typical for a comparative law, the method of continuous sampling of legal terminological units in French, Spanish and German legal texts, comparative analysis of terms and their translated equivalents, and the method of written translation. The results of the conducted analysis will be useful both for further studies of legal discourse and in theoretical and practical classes on legal text translation.