Volume 2, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Law in Transfer and Translation

The terminological problems and pragmatic challenges interpreters regularly face in courts are often posed by judges’ and lawyers’ recourse to argument strategies. However, the analysis of legal argumentation in courtroom interaction has been substantially overlooked in interpreting scholarly settings. Against this background, the paper outlines the preliminary findings of the ArgIntIus project, bridging argumentation theory and court interpreting studies. The project is based on a parallel corpus of selected trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC); building on the assumption that familiarity with the argumentative routines of legal experts plays a crucial role in providing quality interpreting services, the project aims at detecting recurring argument strategies used in ICC trials and analysing their renditions by experienced interpreters, with a view to promoting the quest for pragmatic equivalence in interpreter-mediated courtroom interaction. The paper focuses on the trial of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo and draws on argumentation theory to analyse judicial discourse. The findings suggest that specific argument strategies are recurrently implemented by ICC lawyers; particularly, the relativity of legal arguments stands out, as their use often varies depending on whether the arguer is a member of the prosecution or the defence team. Notably, legal arguments are regularly reproduced by ICC interpreters who, thus, appear to be aware of the pragmatic implications of legal argumentation. A number of argument strategies and their respective interpretations are discussed, together with the training implications of the research project and the contribution of argumentation theory to court interpreting studies.

While both translation process and product have been the subject of abundant research, in the Translation Studies literature there seems to be a lack of focus on the role of the translator (Dam, Helle V. & Karen Korning Zethsen. 2009. Translation studies: Focus on the translator. Hermes Journal of Language and Communication Studies 42(1). 7–12). The implication here seems to be that there is a general consensus – though not supported by much empirical evidence – on the inferior status of translators (Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet & Miriam Shlesinger (eds.). 2011. Identity and status in the translational professions . Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing). Nevertheless, the perception of and expectations from translators are a rather relevant issue, particularly in the field of legal translation (for an overview, see Pym, Anthony, François Grin, Claudio Sfreddo et al. 2012. The status of the translation profession in the European Union (DGT/2011/TST) . Final Report. Luxembourg: European Commission) where the responsibility placed on legal interpreters and translators is extremely high. This paper aims at investigating the perception of legal translators – mostly in terms of professional requirements and translation quality – in both academia and the professional environment, based on the findings of a survey carried out within the QUALETRA project (JUST/2011/JPEN/AG/2975) and a study carried out at the University of Trieste on the role of translators in local criminal proceedings.

As one of the most touristic areas in Spain, the Costa del Sol has a considerable percentage of foreign residents, both temporary and permanent. This leads to a demand for translation and interpretation services, especially with respects to tourism. Permanent residents of Malaga often require linguistic or cultural mediation. Depending on the nature of the situation, these services may be provided by either translators or interpreters or, in some instances, such as medical appointments and other daily activities, a non-professional translation or interpretation is often the adopted solution. However, in the legal field circumstances are different due to the fact that some written documents require a specific type of translation for administrative procedures. In this case, a professional figure known as the ‘sworn translator’ ( traductor-intérprete jurado ) necessarily comes into play. The official name of this professional has recently been changed (2009) from intérprete jurado (literally “sworn interpreter”) to traductor-intérprete jurado (literally “sworn translator and interpreter”). Before this legal modification solely the interpreting activity was mentioned while, paradoxically, the tasks performed were mainly related to translation, especially in the legal field. Although academia seems to separate translation and interpreting into two different professions, this paper aims to explore the figure of the sworn translator and interpreter, in line with the new name established in the legal decree, as a field of confluence between these two activities which, as we will see, are not always mutually exclusive.

Certain linguistic and cultural problems often emerge in legal translation due to a particular clash between two different legal systems and legal cultures. Islamic legal culture, as any other legal culture, is replete with terms and statements, which are deemed an important part of legal Arabic and therefore Islamic jurisprudence. In other words, such Islamic cultural legal terms and statements can never be legally interpreted unless the translator is fully acquainted with Islamic Law and Islamic legal culture. The present paper argues that Islamic legal culture has considerable impact on Islamic statements such that these statements may acquire a legal meaning which may not be comprehended by the target reader, particularly if he/she is not acquainted with Islamic Law and its legal culture. Consequently, the translator should play a substantial role in clarifying the cultural impact on these statements to the target reader so that he/she may comprehend the intended legal meaning.

This article starts by briefly introduc i ng the origin, importance, and complexity of legal translation as well as the relationship between legal translation and comparative law; that is, the activities of a legal translator and those of a comparatist. The article then continues with its main topic, which is to illustrate problems in domesticating and foreignising translation strategies. Before translating a text from one language into another, the translator needs to mediate between two cultures and make a choice: to adopt a strategy aimed at maintaining the morphosyntactic, lexical, and stylistic structures of the source language, or to choose a strategy intended to convey certain morphosyntactic, lexical, and stylistic aspects in order to bring the translation closer to the target language and culture (Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The translator’s invisibility. A history of translation . London: Routledge). Like other translators, a legal translator has various choices to make, including whether to opt for mainly foreignising (source-oriented) translation strategies, whose purpose is to maintain, observe, and respect the literal meaning of the source language, legal system, and legal culture as much as possible. On the other hand, the translator may prefer mainly domesticating (target-oriented) translation strategies, whose aim is to reformulate the message and adapt the original content while observing rules and considering the linguistic, legal, and cultural features of the target language and culture (Paolucci, Sandro. 2013a. Strategia estraniante e strategia addomesticante nella traduzione dei testi giuridici. Linguistica 53(2). 73–89). Although the dichotomy between foreignising and domesticating translations has a long history (reflection on a mainly literal translation or a more liberal translation was discussed as early as ancient Rome, especially in literary translation; Ožbot, Martina. 2016. O drugačnosti prevodov in drugačnosti njihovega sodobnega raziskovanja. In Zupan Sosič (ed.), Drugačnost v slovenskem jeziku, literaturi in kulturi: 52. seminar slovenskega jezika, literature in kulture . 28–37. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete), this article first presents translation theories by scholars such as Schleiermacher, Venuti, and others. It continues with a more detailed focus on the use of foreignising and domesticating strategies in legal translation. After a short presentation of some basic elements and factors that contribute to determining the translator’s strategic choices, a methodology is proposed with specific cases, supported by concrete examples in which the translator should mainly use a foreignising translation and cases in which a domesticating translation is more suitable, efficient, or even necessary. The proposal has been confirmed by the results of a survey conducted in 2016 among forty Italian and Slovenian legal translators who were asked to translate from Slovene into Italian some legal terms contained in normative, expository and informative legal texts.

Based on a previous case study on common translation errors made by trainee translators when dealing with phraseological units in legal translation (Huertas Barros and Buendía Castro 2018, Analysing phraseological units in legal translation: Evaluation of translation errors for the English-Spanish language pair. In S. Gozdz Roszkowski & G. Pontrandolfo (eds.), Phraseology in legal and institutional settings: A corpus-based interdisciplinary perspective (Law, Language and Communication) . London & New York: Routledge), this paper proposes some activities and approaches to minimise these errors and hence enhance students’ phraseological competence in this field. To this end, the authors first provide a description of the most representative legal resources available for translators, particularly for the English-Spanish language pair. This is followed by a review of approaches that could develop students’ legal translation competence, particularly phraseological competence. For each type of error identified in the previous case study, the authors propose a set of research-based activities which could prevent such errors by maximising the use of legal resources. The emphasis is put on preliminary documentary research and effective use of corpora prior to the translation task. The authors propose an integrated approach combining task-based approaches with approaches based on critical discourse analysis, problem-solving and decision-making. While these tasks have been designed for a semi-specialised legal text pertaining to a subdomain of family law (i.e. adoption), they can be easily applied to any other subdomains of legal translation.

The inclusion of specialised corpora in terminological studies since the early 1990s has allowed for the observation and description of the behaviour of terminology in authentic linguistic contexts. As a result, what is nowadays known as “Textual Terminology” (Bourigault & Slodzian 1999, Pour une terminologie textuelle. Terminologies Nouvelles 19. 29–32) has become commonplace practice in the study of terminology. This new approach to terminology has led to the development of alternative paradigms to the General Theory of Terminology and to increasing interest in terminological variation, i.e. the existence of multiple terms to refer to a single concept. In this paper, the focus is on terminological variation in legal terminology. Variation in terminology can be studied from a number of perspectives and the one undertaken here is diachronic. The aim of the paper is to determine whether legal terminology, being “the most visible and striking linguistic feature of legal language” (Cao 2007: 53, Translating law . Clevedon/Buffalo/Toronto: Multilingual Matters) but also deemed to change very slowly (Lemmens 2011, The slow dynamics of legal language: Festina lente? Terminology 17(1). 74–93), is subject to terminological variation in the short term and, if so, what type of variation it experiences. To do so, European Union legal acts in English and Italian and national legal acts in Italian dealing with the topic of victims of crime and their rights were examined and concrete examples of denominative and conceptual variation were extracted. The presence of two legal systems in the analysis made it necessary to add the ‘legal system’ variable to the methodological framework to provide a more comprehensive picture of the types of short-term variation detected. The inclusion of this variable led to the classification of the variants into two types, i.e. ‘intra-systemic’ and ‘inter-systemic’ variation. Moreover, an attempt was also made to classify the variants discussed in the paper against Picton’s typology for the description of short-term knowledge evolution through terminology (Picton 2014, The dynamics of terminology in short-term diachrony. A proposal for a corpus-based methodology to observe knowledge evolution. In R. Temmerman & M. Van Campenhoudt (eds.), Dynamics and terminology. An interdisciplinary perspective on monolingual and multilingual culture-bound communication , 157–182. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins). This attempt resulted in the recognition of the lack of suitable categories for all the types of variation identified and thus of the need for further investigation of the dynamics of legal terminology embedded in a multi-level jurisdiction such as the EU.

This study starts with the multi-dimensional analysis of describing linguistic variation in legislative discourse through three corpora (Chinese legislative corpus, the corresponding English translation corpus and American legislative corpus). Based on the findings from the multi-dimensional data derived from the factor analysis, contrastive interpretations are provided for related legal representations. This study then goes further to apply the corpus-based multi-dimensional analytical approach, deducing total 53 features into 5 interpretable underlying dimensions, represented as: Dimension 1 Involved Production vs. Specialized Information Density; Dimension 2 Narrative vs. Non-Narrative Discourse; Dimension 3 Author-centered Explicitness vs. Situational-dependent Reference; Dimension 4 Overly vs. Not Overly Expression of Persuasion; and Dimension 5 Abstract Description vs. Non-impersonal Style. After the analysis of certain typical patterns among these five dimensions, this study identifies and discusses four legal representations (non-narrative and explicitness, high informational density, the decontextualized style, and less overly persuasion) as key features represented in legislative discourse. Finally, general characteristics, tendencies and preferences identified in the three types of legislative texts are further deduced and interpreted from jurisprudential perspectives.