Legal Translation Research Articles

Judicial interpreting institutionalization in criminal proceedings: European practices and Russian perspectives

The research studies the institute of court interpreting in several European countries and the prospects of forming the institute of court interpreting in Russia. It bridges the previous studies concerning professionalization of this activity into the new realia and extends into legal regulation, market, and administration. The research raises awareness of the multifaceted process of forming the institute of judicial interpreting to the benefit of civil society. The issues concerning education of interpreters participating in judicial setting, level of language proficiency, qualification, authorization of legal interpreters and translators, their status, rights and obligations, code of ethics and some others inherent to the process of institutionalization are in the focus. It also highlights the grounds and voices prospects for the development of the institute of legal interpreters in Russia. The research methods are divided into theoretical and analytical, comparative, and contrastive and methods of reasoning, evaluation and summarising allowing to balance the material according to the academic aims. The practical relevance of the work rests in unifying and harmonising legal, administrative, and professional aspects of court interpreting institutionalisation within European space.

Between Asylum and Liberation: The New Palestinian Refugees

Abstract Contemporary Palestinian asylum seekers raise fundamental questions regarding the relationship between the institution of asylum and struggles for national liberation. Underlying the legal framework that applies to them is an assumption of inverse correlation: the more Palestinians obtain access to individual asylum claims, the less secure are the fundamental Palestinian claims of self-determination and return. But is this trade-off acceptable today? Comparable dilemmas animate other large-scale displacements, but scholars seldom discuss their full implications for international legal theory. Rather than providing a definite answer to the question, this article maps out four major aspects of how individual protection and self-determination are interrelated, or, indeed, bifurcated, in international law. The new Palestinian refugees are important to consider not only because their continued displacement is foreseeable but also because their exceptional plight invites a reconsideration of the political foundations of refugee law. How can policy makers and legal interpreters uphold principles of both individual and collective protection, preventing the two from cutting against each other?

Translation Errors Across Legal Titles and Headings: Critical Analysis of the English Version of the Russian Criminal Procedural Code.

The study integrates theoretical and empirical investigation, uses error-based analysis techniques to identify mistakes and classify them within major language subsystems. A case study methodology and descriptive statistics were used to explore the language of the chapter titles and article headings, applied error-based analysis techniques. The mentioned analysis was conducted by a number of professional legal translators. The analysis revealed that English version of the Code titles and headings under study contains 17% of grammar errors, 14% of vocabulary errors, and 7% of the graphic errors. The material below introduces most typical errors and ways for their identification and correction. The findings confirmed the research hypothesis on the challenges to the quality assurance regarding the translation of domestic legislation into a foreign language at the level of the legislation documents headings. The research confirmed the importance to go beyond the legal dictionary and encyclopedia entries, underlined the relevance and urgent need to more focus on the target language legislative sources of equal or similar branch and genre and academic practice in the respective areas. Therefore, the results can become the basis for future research on the theory of translation of legal texts and documents.

Is Plain Legal Language Easy to Translate?

This article examines two machine translations of the same English contract (contract of supply) made using DeepL Pro in March 2022 and March 2023. The contract was used in my practice as a legal translator trainer. It proved easy to understand but difficult to translate into Polish, where plain legal language is much less developed than in English. The history of plain language in the UK, the US and Poland is briefly presented. The analysis of features of plain English covers: expressions from general language when mixed with legal or technical language, the pronoun you referring to one party to the contract, and other features, like active voice and short sentences. Additionally, renditions of expressions denoting obligation or permission are analysed separately as an important element of contracts. The conclusion is that pronoun you in this context constituted a major source of difficulty and was translated in many ways. The translations are also uneven in terms of register (formal legal language vs language of instructions) or forms of address (degree of politeness), which would make post-editing them demanding. Other problems that a post-editor would face include terminological inconsistency and increased number of nominalizations compared to source text. The active voice or length of sentences are unproblematic in MT. Both legal translators and MT providers should refer to existing plain Polish contracts for solutions.

Teaching vocabulary in the course of legalese and legal translation

The article analyzes and describes special characteristics of vocabulary of legal English and translation courses and ways to teach such lexis. It examines methods of vocabulary selection on the basis of contrastive analysis of the profession-oriented lexical units, terms and other frequent vocabulary of the language of commercial and corporate law. The vocabulary is limited to the lexical units that pose difficulties to Russian speaking students. The paper describes and analyzes the vocabulary which reflects such phenomena as polysemy, homonymy, and paronymy and other lexical phenomena frequent in the language of law and causing learners’ errors. Moreover, the author considers lexical and grammatical problems such as the compatibility of words, the change of the meaning of a noun with a change in the grammatical number, special aspects of word formation etc. The paper describes pedagogical and linguodidactic aspects of teaching applying methods of contrastive and comparative lexicology. They include early prevention techniques, regular monitoring, as well as introduction and drilling of learners` independent analysis and self-control skills. It concludes with the recommendations related to the type of exercises designed for processing and practicing this layer of vocabulary within the framework of the introductory course of legal English.

Teaching English for Legal Purposes to Undergraduate Translation Majors

To enable students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation to read, identify the lexical and syntactic features of legal documents and hence comprehend their content, this article proposes an instructional module for teaching English for Legal Purposes (ELP). The module should be based on the assessment of the students’ proficiency level in English and analysis of their academic and professional need. It consists of the most common legal terms such as (alias, amicus, peosequi, res judicata, puisine, puis ne, estoppel fee, simple laches, quash); grammatical structures common in legal documents such as the use of long and complex sentences, conditional clauses, adverbial clusters, long complicated nominal groups, the modal auxiliary shall, and French word order (court martial, heir apparent, secretary general); reading legal documents such as insurance policies, wills, statutes, contracts and agreements between individuals, leases, petitions, investigations...etc. Global legal themes are integrated in the practice material. The students practice listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. They learn the legal terms and grammatical structures in context (through the text). The instructor performs text analysis. Together with the students, she goes through a legal text, locates legal terms and syntactic structures, and explains and/or translates them. Then the students perform text analysis of new legal texts. Numerous technologies can be integrated into teaching and learning ELP. Assignments are posted on Blackboard LMS, a blog or a social media page. At the end of the instructional period, the students are tested, and the ELP module is evaluated by the students and legal translation instructors. The article recommends that ELP be student-centered. The students should have an active role in the learning process where they select legal topics to read, talk, write about and translate.

Dealing with Legal Terminology in The Translation of Business Documents

It is commonly acknowledged that one distinctive feature of legal language is the complex and unique legal vocabulary. Legal terminology is the most prominent and noticeable linguistic feature of legal language and it is one of the major sources of difficulty in translating legal documents. When we translate a term from one language into a term from another language, we should find out if the relevant concepts associated with both terms correspond. Hence, legal translation is not automatic transfer of a concept from one language into another, but it requires thorough knowledge of the two legal systems in contact as well as a comparative analysis of the text and the terms to be translated.

Chomsky's generative theory and its use in legal translation (Models between Arabic and Persian)

The research deals with the scientific and academic necessity in the field of contemporary linguistic research and translation studies called for new and advanced scientific theories in line with technological developments and modern information in the world, using different letters between the fields of science and knowledge, and thus resulted in new research methods with the linguistic phenomenon to vary its communicative functions. the overview, theories, the appearance of the formula in its wide form and the legal translation in a narrower form. Research aims: discuss the most important content of legal language and its translation methods, equivalence and translation equivalence, translation transformations such as rearranging, addition, deletion and replacement, legal linguistic levels, including the level of legal discourse, and its relationship to other legal linguistic levels. The research adopts the qualitative field-experimental approach by benefiting from the researcher’s experiences in addition to studying a number of official translations of documents, documents, legal texts and contracts between the Arabic and Persian languages. The course of the study should be from the general to the specific, i.e. a review of the general translation, then the sworn translation, down to the problems associated with it

Subtitling the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia from Italian into English: An Analysis of Cultural Transfer

Besides big Hollywood productions, like The Godfather trilogy, and video-on-demand productions, like The Sopranos, both filmed in English, new popular Italian productions, based on the linguistic and cultural representation of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia, have gained momentum. Nonetheless, the body of academic research on the linguistic traits of the former is larger than research on the latter. This study aims to investigate how and by which strategies the lexicon and the culture-bound terms related to the concept of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia are culturally transferred and subtitled from Italian into English. The TV series Vendetta: guerra nell’antimafia is used as the corpus for both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. Results show that the translation of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia for the purpose of audiovisual translation, through subtitling, is a simpler and less convoluted form of translation than written legal translation, aimed at conveying complex concepts in a simpler way.

A Critical Analysis of Saudi Legal Terms and their English Translations

The differences between the Arabic and English linguistic systems and legal cultures have long been a fundamental challenge in legal translation. Examining how the dissimilarities between the Saudi and English legal cultures affect the Arabic-English legal translation has received little attention from researchers. Therefore, this critical analysis aims to examine the Arabic-English translation of 12 Saudi legal articles to identify the linguistic and cultural factors involved in the translation process. Since research that addresses the difficulties and challenges of translating the legal discourse is of undeniable significance and studies that examined the Saudi legal discourse and its translation are scarce; therefore, this study attempts to contribute to the literature by analyzing several Saudi Legal Articles and their English translations to define the challenges of translating legal terms from Arabic into English. The study adopted Šarčević’s (2000) functional equivalence framework to study the Saudi Legal Articles and their official English translations. This framework was selected because it is well suited to examine the equivalent level of the legal terms and their translations, which is the main objective of this study. This study attempts to analyze different legal terms that characterize the selected Saudi legal articles and their official English translations. The investigated legal terms include religious, culture-specific, archaic, and doublets. This study revealed that translating Arabic religious and culture-specific terms and doublets is challenging, whereas translating Arabic archaic words is much easier.

THE TRANSLATION OF SPEECH ACTS IN ARABIC LEGAL DOCUMENTS: A CASE STUDY OF PALESTINE DIVORCE CONTRACTS

This study deals with the translation of speech acts in legal documents from Arabic into English. It aims at describing the translatability of speech acts to determine whether there are meaning loss or meaning gain and the reasons behind that. In doing so, the study follows Searle’s speech acts concept and taxonomy since Searle’s taxonomy is based on the illocutionary force of the speech act. Being a qualitative study, samples of translated divorce contracts have been collected from Palestinian sworn translators and translation certified offices. Speech acts have been identified, categorized, and analyzed based on Searle taxonomy. Then, the translation of the speech acts is analyzed in terms of the meaning of the illocutionary force of the different speech acts. The study has revealed that the illocutionary force is conveyed completely in some cases. In other cases, it is affected by the translators’ choices in using active voices instead of passive voices, present perfect and simple past instead of simple present, mistranslation of some verbs expressing directive force, probability modals instead of prohibition modals, style shift from direct speech into indirect speech, and omission of introducing verbs of speech act force. It is concluded that both sematic and pragmatic norms should be taken into consideration in translating speech acts of legal documents, which optimize Arabic - English legal translation.

LEGAL TERMINOLOGY TRANSLATION IN THE TRAINING OF LAW STUDENTS: DIFFICULTIES

The article presents certain difficulties in translating legal terms in training future lawyers. The translation of legal terminology is a comprehensive process that involves knowledge of grammar, common and legal vocabulary, words and phrases of Latin origin, and others. Definitions of «legal terminology», «legal term» and «legal translation» are highlighted. It is stated that legal translation requires a translator’s awareness of the laws, culture, history, national traditions of the source language and the target language in order to reproduce the source information of the target language adequately and fully. The importance of translation dictionaries of legal terminology is emphasized. It is highlighted that information in the third edition of «Documents of the Consultative Council of European Judges» is available in English and Ukrainian. The educational tutorial “Comparative Judicial Law” in the Ukrainian language, which contains information for a full understanding of the judicial system for translating terms has been analyzed. The difficulties of rendering words of Latin origin, passive voice, and clichés are analyzed on the basis of the court case «Francisco Cunanan Pamintuan, Petitioner v. Department of the Navy». It should be remembered that Latin words and phrases are often not translated. The court-presented examples may be used without modification, however, it is advisable to explain or translate them when using them in foreign language classes. One has revealed the methods of translation of legal terms-realities, which are non-equivalent lexical units, as it is difficult to reflect the national identity of a certain country and to find an equivalent that conveys stylistic and semantic nuances in the text of the source language. It has been made clear how important it is to understand the laws, customs, and culture of both one’s own country and the native speaker’s country. It is emphasized that lawyers who work with foreign clients or help Ukrainians who have partners abroad must understand linguistic problems and know legal terms in the process of communication. It is noted that a promising area for the education of law students is the compilation of explanatory and translation dictionaries, which will also help to further lexicography.

TENDENCIES OF TRANSFORMATIONS IN TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH LEGAL TERMS IN THE CONTEXT OF PLAIN ENGLISH CAMPAIGN

The problem of legal discourse translation and interpretation arises due to the numerous issues of globalization and European integration. Although a large number of studies are devoted to peculiarities of English legal discourse, the issue of adequate interpretation of legal terminology is urgent. Moreover, legal terminology is interpreted either using an equivalent, which may not always be understood or known to addressees of the text, or a descriptive translation, that, should be based on the principles of Plain English taking into account the pragmatic component of the translation and which must be as compact and transparent as possible. In the presence of shifts in the semantics of legal terms, not only in the lexical units themselves, but also in the minds of users of the terminology, in the perception and interpretation of the term by a sufficiently wide range of people, the translator must either create a new system, focusing exclusively on dictionary definitions and using dictionary correlations, or use new cross-linguistic terminological units, since the term required for translation is “using” another meaning. The Plain English Campaign is aimed at dealing with extremely difficult and sometimes confusing even for professionals cases of legalese. The approaches and principles of the Plain English Campaign make it possible to achieve accessibility for understanding by representatives of another legal system thorough understanding of legal discourse being translated. Usage of simple, clear language seems necessary; errors, inaccuracies in interpretation, ambiguity and abundant usage of the Passive Voice that are inherent in legalese, are almost impossible in this case. Simple language does not require further explanation and interpretation. We think that in the nearest future, the English legal discourse undergoes simplification. The quality of legal translation in some way affects the efficiency of law enforcement, the degree of regulation of specific relations; therefore a translator must consider both public purpose and legal usage. As a result, seeking an adequate translation, an interpreter should focus on a particular area of law, consider basic grammar features, find Ukrainian equivalents and involve simplification of the legal discourse.

Terminological collocations in trainee and professional legal translations

Abstract This paper examines how translation trainees deal with verb-noun terminological collocations when translating a legal text into their L2. The learner data is juxtaposed with professional translations of the same text and comparable non-translated documents. The results indicate that a large proportion of learner renditions is attested in the reference corpora. There is also a relatively high convergence between learners’ and experts’ choices and symmetrical variability. Unattested and inadequate equivalents demonstrate a large variability and low frequency of individual items, which suggests a lack of systematic patterns in mistranslations. The inadequacy of learner solutions is mainly caused by the choice of a collocate and results in information transfer and naturalness errors, with the former being more idiosyncratic and the latter more recurrent. In conclusion, we argue for viewing L2 collocational competence through the lens of genre requirements and professional practice rather than dichotomous categories of nativelike and non-nativelike collocations.

A case study on the evaluation of Korean-English legal translations by generic and custom neural machine translation engines

This paper addresses the quality of Korean-English legal translation outputs generated by three neural machine translation engines, namely NMT1, NMT2 and NMT3. NMT1 and NMT2 are widely available multilingual generic machine translation engines, whereas NMT3 is a custom machine translation engine for legal translation. In both automatic and human evaluations of the three engines’ English translations of Korean statutes, the custom engine outperformed the other two NMTs. BLEU and METEOR scores revealed that NMT3’s output was more similar to human reference translation. Human evaluation results confirmed NMT3’s strong performance, outperforming the generic engines in accuracy and fluency while underperforming in terminology. However, further analysis revealed that NMT3 was superior in handling terms comprising compound nouns and sentences over 25 words. Although the custom engine’s performance still requires substantial human involvement for quality translation, it showed a potential for the legal domain, demonstrating human parity in short sentences. The growing demand for speedy translation under budget constraints calls for further research on technology-based translation tools and human-computer interaction for legal translation.

Building the Leeds Monolingual and Parallel Legal Corpora of Arabic and English Countries’ Constitutions: Methods, Challenges and Solutions

Arabic corpora have existed since the last decade of the past century. Although they are constantly increasing, more advanced tools and morpho-syntactically annotated Arabic corpora are still needed for research and teaching. Likewise, parallel and specialised corpora are rare despite the growing need to use them in empirical linguistic investigations of authentic Arabic texts and for language and translation teaching. Therefore, building legal corpora will pave the way for more research in Arabic legal translation, an area which is under-researched worldwide. This paper aims to discuss the building of a collection of specialised parallel and monolingual legal corpora. In particular, it will discuss the building of diachronic corpora, which include all available constitutions of 22 Arabic countries. The aim of building all available versions of these constitutions is two-fold: (1) interdisciplinary corpus-based and socio-cultural investigations and (2) research-led and blended-learning pedagogical approaches to translation teaching and learning. Thus, these corpora are of great value to translation trainers and researchers, law academics and professionals, and governmental, non-governmental and international organisations. The paper will demonstrate the process of building these specialised complex corpora and the challenges encountered throughout this process. Among the challenges faced during the data collection and processing phases are (1) limitations of finding the original constitutions for each Arabic country since some of them date back to 1922; (2) file conversion and the difficulty of choosing one Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool to rely on for the Arabic language since many lack accuracy, efficiency as well as encoding issues in Arabic.

Issues in Legal Translation: Challenges and Suggestions

Issues in Legal Translation: Challenges and Suggestions

Corpus of Founding Era American English: designing a corpus for interpreting the United States Constitution

The original meaning of words or phrases is often in dispute in Founding Era legislation, especially the US Constitution. The Corpus of Founding Era American English (cofea) accurately provides evidence for the meaning of contested terms during the Founding Era. cofea consists of 126,394 texts and over 136 million words. This corpus has been and is being used by legal researchers and interpreters in scholarly research as well as various courts, including the Supreme Court. This paper describes the motivation for the creation of cofea and describes the process of designing and collecting the corpus.

The Analysis of Decision of The Constitutional Court Number 97/Puu-Xiv/2016 Concerning Population Administration on The Rights and Position of Believers

<em>The research is to take a closer and explicit look at the position of believers in the Constitutional Court's decision through synchronizing the existence or existence of believers in Yogyakarta. In order to ensure whether or not these concerns are true, and to what extent are the rights and positions guaranteed in the decision of the Constitutional Court, and what is the position of believers in the Constitutional Court Decision Number 97/PUUXIV/2016 concerning Population administration in terms of perspective (Maqāṣid ash-Syarī‘ah). The type of legal research used in the preparation of this research is field research, which is conducting direct observations with in-depth interviews with sources that have been determined based on the researcher's knowledge using the purposive sampling method. The approach used in this research is normative juridical (Statute Approach) and empirical or sociological juridical. The normative juridical approach is carried out by referring to the legal norms contained in the legislation, decisions and legal norms that exist in society. The results of the research show that the considerations of the judges of the Constitutional Court related to the Philosophical, Textual, and Sociological Legal Interpreters in deciding the case Number 97/PUU-XIV/2016 concerning the review of the Population Administration Law, have fulfilled the basic rights of believers and provide justice to adherents of the sect. trust, then when viewed with the study of Human Rights the Constitutional Court's </em>

A fascinating game of ‘what if?’ and ‘why not?’: an out-of-the-chorus proposal to EU legal translation

A fascinating game of ‘what if?’ and ‘why not?’: an out-of-the-chorus proposal to EU legal translation