Legal translation

thumb|Complexity of legal translation

Legal translation is the translation of language used in legal settings and for legal purposes. Legal translation may also imply that it is a specific type of translation only used in law, which is not always the case. As law is a culture-dependent subject field, legal translation is not necessarily linguistically transparent. Intransparency in translation can be avoided somewhat by use of Latin legal terminology, where possible, but in non-western languages debates are centered on the origins and precedents of specific terms, such as in the use of particular Chinese characters in Japanese legal discussions.

Intransparency can lead to expensive misunderstandings in terms of a contract, for example, resulting in avoidable lawsuits. Legal translation is thus usually done by specialized law translators. Conflicts over the legal impact of a translation can be avoided by indicating that the text is "authentic" i.e. legally operative on its own terms or instead is merely a "convenience translation", which itself is not legally operative. Courts only apply authentic texts and do not rely on "convenience" translations in adjudicating rights and duties of litigants.

Source text and target text

Most legal writing is exact and technical, seeking to precisely define legally binding rights and duties. Thus, precise correspondence of these rights and duties in the source text and in the translation is essential. As well as understanding and precisely translating the legal rights and duties established in the translated text, legal translators must also bear in mind the legal system of the source text (ST) and the legal system of the target text (TT) which may differ greatly from each other. This is a challenge because it requires that the translator have substantial legal knowledge as well as the multiple legal systems that can exist in one language. An example that highlights this complication with transcription is displaying dialect in writing. The fundamental problem with this situation is that the transcribed product is not simply a spoken language in its written form, but a language the transcriber is responsible for writing down and a language that has been transcribed by someone other than the speaker, no matter the level of understanding the transcriber has for the spoken language. Any transcription is an interpretation of the speech no matter how detailed it is, and will be selective in what it includes or leave out. Because of this reason, it is important to strategically choose the form of transcription in order to properly represent the spoken language in a written form.

Bilingual law dictionaries

Legal translators often consult specialized bilingual or polyglot law dictionaries. Care should be taken, as some bilingual law dictionaries are of poor quality and their use may lead to mistranslation. Bilingual legal dictionaries tend to largely be a source of reference for interpretation, rather than a source of literal equivalent translations of legal terminology. Translating legal text from one language to another becomes a challenge for legal experts because there is a level of freedom to translating texts that retain meaning and not necessarily maintaining equivalent semantic structure. There is also a debate between experts to either restrict the legal language to the target text for professional use or to broaden legal language for the use and comprehension of the public, specifically in societies with bilingual law system.

Source text and target text

Bilingual law dictionaries

See also