Abstract
Literal translation has been a long tradition in legal translation. However, rigid literal translation has lost ground in modern legal translation and given way to sense-for-sense, idiomatic translation. Drawing on the literature on legal translation, this paper examines controversies surrounding literal translation and idiomatic translation in legal translation and seeks ways to improve the quality of Korea statutory translation provided by the Korea Legislation Research Institute. Despite the proclaimed principle of accurate and natural translation that is comprehensible to native speakers of English, literal translation is prevalent in the Institute’s statutory translation, which undermines its translation service quality. Based on a small corpus of Korean-English statutory translation by the Institute, this paper examines instances of literal translation which realized lexical and syntactic equivalence in preference to natural and idiomatic translation. The analysis also shed some light on legal translation strategies based on a recipient-oriented approach and calls for further research on legal translation strategies and legal translation training.
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