Using Parallel Corpora to Study the Translation of Legal System-Bound Terms: The Case of Names of English and Spanish Courts

Abstract

Corpus-based Translation Studies has opened new avenues to research since Mona Baker published her seminal study back in the 1990s. In comparison to other domains within Translation Studies, in legal translation corpus-based research has not been so widely used despite its incontestable potential and usefulness. In this field, parallel corpora are chiefly used to study the translation process and to identify translation options for problematic terminological and phraseological units. Hence, parallel corpora allow researchers to systematically and objectively study the solutions given to pre-identified translation problems, like legal system-bound terms, which are the quintessential feature of legal translation as clear exponents of legal asymmetry and conceptual-terminological incongruity.