Abstract
Legal translation is often claimed to be one of the most difficult types of technical translation. The difficulty may partly be due to the characteristic features of legal discourse which is typically archaic, obscure, complex, and culturally-bound, different linguistic systems, and the type of equivalence the legal translator seeks to achieve; and partly be due to the item-centered approach commonly used in teaching legal translation which emphasizes word-for-word equivalence. The present paper introduces a discourse-oriented approach as an alternative to the currently-used method of teaching legal translation in Iraqi universities. The major argument is that teaching legal translation at discourse level helps the students of translation to recognize the lexical, grammatical, pragmatic, and stylistic dimensions of the legal text which are essential for providing appropriate legal equivalence. Keywords: legal translation, legal equivalence, translation instruction, discourse-oriented approach, characteristics of legal discourse DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-17-03 Publication date: June 30th 2020
Highlights
Legal translation is a special type of technical translation which involves the transcoding of a legal text in one language into another
The present paper discusses the nature of legal discourse and its consequences on legal translation; the sources of difficulties which students of translation often encounter when translating legal texts especially English legal texts into Arabic, and the types of equivalence the legal translator seeks to achieve
Teaching legal translation should involve www.iiste.org drawing the translation students' attention to the SL aspects of lexical cohesion such as reiteration, collocation and other lexical relations and aspects of grammatical cohesion such as ellipsis, expansion, embedding, word order, voice, as well as the information structure and the effect of these aspects on the sequence and focus of information and the restriction imposed upon the selection of words to achieve coherence and to produce the same legal effect in both the SL and TL texts as far as possible To implement this approach in a legal translation class, the following steps are suggested: 1. Ask students to read the source text closely, looking up the new words in a legal or bilingual dictionary
Summary
Legal translation is a special type of technical translation which involves the transcoding of a legal text in one language into another. The present paper discusses the nature of legal discourse and its consequences on legal translation; the sources of difficulties which students of translation often encounter when translating legal texts especially English legal texts into Arabic, and the types of equivalence the legal translator seeks to achieve. It suggests a discourse-oriented approach to teaching legal translation taking into consideration the difficulties encountered by the translation students in achieving optimal legal equivalence at lexical, grammatical, and textual levels. How can the discourse-based approach suggested be helpful in overcoming the difficulties that face legal translation students in providing legal equivalence at various levels of linguistic analysis?
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