The Analysis of English-Persian Legal Translations Based on Systemic Functional Grammar Approach (SFG)

Abstract

This paper tries to analyze the errors arising in translation of legal documents from English to Persian. Most of the researchers conducted on explaining the complexity of legal language, has shown that vocabulary and terminology has justifiably received the most attention, as lexis fulfills the symbolic or representational function of language better than any other linguistic component. Consequently it has been supposed that in legal translation, just finding appropriate equivalent for vocabulary and terminology is sufficient. But in this paper, which examines the errors occurred in English –Persian translation of legal documents, the translated text will be analyzed at sentence level based on a meaning-based functional approach ; i.e. Systemic Functional Grammar Approach (SFG) to see whether we can apply it as an objective criteria for error analysis of translated legal documents & how. For this purpose, nine error categories were considered; including interpersonal, textual, logical and experiential metafunctions and in order to understand experiential meaning, it was broken into three functional constituents; that is participant, process and circumstance. Further to the above categories, three other issues, including mistranslation, omission and word choice were considered, as well. Then while dividing the legal text into separate sentences, each sentence was analyzed according to these categories. The results of this research show that SFG approach would be an appropriate criteria and scale for evaluating the accuracy of the legal documents translation, not only for legal translators in producing an accurate and perfect translation, but also for teachers in evaluating the students’ translation abilities, objectively.