Legal translation

Legal translation is the translation of texts within the field of law. As law is a culture-dependent subject field, the work of legal translation and its products are not necessarily linguistically transparent.

As the mistranslation of a passage in a contract, for example, could lead to lawsuits and loss of money, translation is often considered to be preferably handled by professional translators specialising in legal translation should translate legal documents and scholarly writings.

When translating a text within the field of law, the translator should keep the following in mind. The legal system of the source text (ST) is structured in a way that suits that culture and this is reflected in the legal language; similarly, the target text (TT) is to be read by someone who is familiar with the other legal system (corresponding to the jurisdiction for which TT is prepared) and its language. Most forms of legal writing, and contracts in particular, seek to establish clearly defined rights and duties for certain individuals. It is essential to ensure precise correspondence of these rights and duties in the source text and in the translation. Legal translation may also involve, certificates of accuracy, witness statements, depositions, trusts, wills, articles of incorporation, litigation documents, immigration documents, property/exhibit labels and in some cases attendance in court by the translator(s).

Apart from terminological lacunae, or lexical gaps, the translator may focus on the following aspects. Textual conventions in the source language are often culture-dependent and may not correspond to conventions in the target culture (see e.g. Nielsen 2010). Linguistic structures that are often found in the source language may have no direct equivalent structures in the target language. The translator therefore has to be guided by certain standards of linguistic, social and cultural equivalence between the language used in the source text (ST) to produce a text (TT) in the target language. Those standards correspond to a variety of different principles defined as different approaches to translation in translation theory. Each of the standards sets a certain priority among the elements of ST to be preserved in TT. For example, following the functional approach, translators try to find target language structures with the same functions as those in the source language thus value the functionality of a text fragment in ST more than, say, the meanings of specific words in ST and the order in which they appear there.

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