It is true that the legal system of any country is the result of its historical, political and cultural development of people. As a result the field of legal translation has also developed deeply integrated roots with these aspects of society.
Even though a large part of our population considers legal language to be obscure, it still has a strong presence all around us. Laws regulate most of our daily activities. For instance when we want to download an app from AppStore, we have to accept certain terms and conditions for using the software. Similarly when we are driving our own car or are being driven on public transport, all drivers have to follow certain traffic rules which are ascertained by our legal system.
Further with globalization on rise and internet becoming the talk of town, this has resulted in extensive cross cultural integration between societies and languages. As a result legal translation is required in a myriad of situations.
Just few legal documents that often require legal translation includes documents such as legislative texts, international treaties, court documents, administrative texts, commercial texts and financial texts. Due to the universal nature of law, legal documents can range from a very large variety of fields. Thus legal translation might also be required for a variety of documents, which can range from documents such as patents, birth certificates, death certificates, court judgments, affidavits to a love letter or suicide note in a court case.
Legal translators should reflect the true meaning and the underlying intention of a source document in the target document they produce. Since beginning legal translation was often compared to Bible translation, as it dealt with the word of law, and thus legal translators were forced to translate literally, debating faithfulness to the original text. This strict adherence to the source text words didn’t allow room for creativity and proper development of legal translation studies.
However the study of legal translation has evolved since then and the translation community now considers loyalty to the communicative function of the target text as paramount. More importance is given to accuracy of target text content than to strict adherence to the words of source text.
Secondly a legal translator besides working in between two languages and two cultures, also has to work between two different legal systems. Since legal systems have historical, political and cultural elements inherently attached to them, the legal systems that belong to different official languages also have inherent socio-cultural and historical differences in their legal texts. The problem is further aggravated when the same terms have different meaning in different legal systems.
For example, Common law a term we often hear in many English legal texts is the basis of legal system in United States, England and Wales, but not in Scotland. Further Common law is followed in Australia but its definition differs, largely due to the different socio-cultural conditions that were prevalent in Australia. Thus translating such terms require a strong understanding of the context in which the term is used.
While translating legal documents in between culturally different countries such as Saudi Arabia where Islamic law is followed, and United Kingdom, where English law is followed, a legal translator will require extensive background knowledge of the source text to deliver high quality legal translation. One problem legal translators often face is that there are many cultural terms used in such legal texts that don’t have an equivalent word in the English vocabulary. Translators thus have to do a literal translation of such terms or resort to other appropriate translation techniques.
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