Strategies and Techniques of the Translation of International Law Documents

Abstract

The article deals with the issue of international legal documents translation from English into Russian. Translation strategies are identified which allow achieving accuracy in the translation of legal texts. The paper uses such research methods as contextual analysis, descriptive analysis, comparative analysis, definition analysis, distributive analysis. The factors that complicate the translation of legal texts are identified, including replenishment of the legal terminology system with neologisms and abundance of specialized legal terminology and terminology of related fields of knowledge. It is pointed out that the translator must possess specialized knowledge, as well as a high level of translation and linguacultural competence, which will help to avoid distortion of meaning and violation of the logic when translating from English into Russian. The author identifies the translation techniques used in the translation of legal texts, the choice of which is determined by the analyzed principles and strategies. The research material is the English-language texts of the declarations of BRICS summits and their official translated Russian-language versions. As a result of the research, it was found that the principles of translation of international legal documents correspond to the classical principles of translation, since they require the translator to have a good understanding of the text content, a high level of proficiency in both the source and target languages, preservation of the author’s communicative intention in translation. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the identification of another principle of translation, which a translator should focus on when choosing strategies and techniques for translating international legal texts, in particular, the principle of interdisciplinarity. The author also identifies the main translation techniques, the use of which allows to achieve equivalence and adequacy in translation of legal texts. The research contributes to the development of the theory and practice of translation in general and specialized translation, in particular. In the future, it is planned to conduct comparative studies aimed at identifying the principles, strategies and techniques of translating civil and criminal law documents.