Titles of Acts: Translation from English into Russian

Abstract

The article examines titles of English acts such as ‘The Act of Settlement 1701’, ‘The Instrument of Government 1653’, ‘The Act of Supremacy; 1534, 1559, ‘The Reform Act’ 1832, 1867, 1884 and ‘The Test Act’ 1673, 1678 and their translation into the Russian language. The analysis of textbooks and manuals on law and state history of foreign countries in the Russian language shows that their authors refer to the titles that have firmly entrenched in the Russian language, even though some of them have been translated incorrectly. Some researchers provide their own mostly word-for-word translation or totally avoid mentioning the titles of acts in the text. At the same time, adequate translation is essential as it allows readers to elicit necessary information and gain extensive and comprehensive knowledge on the subject. The polysemy of legal terms and the underlying historical background make the process of translation into Russian even more complicated. The differences between legal systems and languages due to their unique historical and cultural development cause difficulties in the translation process even for the most advanced machine translation tools based on neural networks. In order for the translation to be accurate, and therefore the cognitive function to be fully performed in academic texts, it is necessary to be familiar with the field of legal science as a whole, to take into account the historical context as well as the background of a particular act. The lack of background knowledge and the inability to grasp the meaning, role and importance of this or that act of Parliament results in word-for-word erroneous translation that in its turn distorts the original meaning of the text. The polysemy of English terms makes it difficult to find the corresponding equivalent term in Russian. Descriptive translation based on background knowledge with due regard for language peculiarities, as well as the use of such tools as footnotes and comments, can contribute to achieving the purpose.