Volume 2014, Issue 201 - Special Issue: Decision-making in translation, interpretation, and speech act: Legal semiotic culture-mediation techniques

Quite different from translation for general purposes, transplanted legal discourse is often unmatchable to the target discourse community. In reality, exact equivalence could not be found in terms of translation in legal transplant, which means the major task of translation in legal transplant is to solve lacunae, discursive gaps between the source text and the target text. In legal translation, a lacuna seems to constitute a factor of untranslatability. This paper, based on a study of four cases, argues that equivalence can be achieved within the proposed Translational Triangle. The sociosemiotic approach is adopted in this study to explore the complexity in legal translation, and provide insights into legal translation, both theoretically and practically.

This paper analyses the adoption of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration issued by the United Nations in 1985 (and later integrated into the laws of several countries with varying constitutional, socio-cultural, and economic conditions) and its connected Arbitration Rules, in order to highlight the adaptations carried out in its “localization” process. In particular, the paper investigates the influence of the socio-economic environment in which the legal norms were introduced on the style adopted in drafting the texts. The examples are drawn from the norms enacted by Parliaments and arbitration chambers in various countries, whose texts show discrepancies due to different drafting traditions, legal contexts, linguistic specificities, and socio-cultural constraints. The analysis shows that, in spite of the growing efforts of the international community to guarantee greater and greater harmonization in legislation and procedures, specific linguistic and cultural aspects as well as local and social constraints still are a relevant conditioning factor.

Résumé L'auteure propose, dans cet article, une ouverture vers la traduction juridique dans le monde de l'interprétation légitime des lois. Dans ce but, elle distingue entre l'activité d'interprétation dans un sens large et dans un sens strict. Elle limite l'étendue de son étude aux cas de traductions non-officielles en excluant le processus de rédaction de textes parallèles bilingues ou multilingues. Afin d'illustrer l'objectif visé, elle étudie la question de savoir si le traducteur juridique pourrait acquérir les conditions pour accéder au statut d'interprète légitime proposées par Jacques Chevallier, ainsi que la possibilité qu'il participe dans les fonctions de l'interprétation décrites par le même auteur. Son analyse tient compte des propos contraires à sa proposition dans la littérature et suggère des pistes pour surmonter les objections. Finalement, elle met en relief les avantages de l'ouverture proposée, d'une part, dans la recherche de cohérence du droit et, d'autre part, dans une traduction dans la pratique des avancées théoriques qui s'éloignent du positivisme tant dans le domaine de la traduction que du droit.

Résumé La pratique de l'enseignement du droit conjuguée à l'exercice de la traduction juridique constitue le socle de quelques réflexions théoriques et pratiques. L'analyse part-elle de la théorie pour aller vers la pratique ou, au contraire, de la pratique vers la théorie? L'enrichissement mutuel que constitue leur combinaison conduit à un processus constant par allers-retours successifs entre la pratique et la théorie. En effet, l'observation de la pratique de la traduction juridique fournit des informations utiles à son identification et à sa théorisation qui, à son tour, permet d'en améliorer la pratique. Un panorama est brossé de la pratique de la traduction, écrite et orale, dans les divers contextes juridiques: de droit international public, de droit international privé, de droit national, scientifique et judiciaire. La diversité des contextes, des documents à traduire, des destinataires donne la mesure des enjeux et des effets juridiques de la traduction du droit. Cela conduit à s'interroger sur la manière de traduire et à construire une théorie dénommée juritraductologie. Le champ d'investigation consiste à analyser de façon interdisciplinaire et transversale les apports de la science juridique et de la traductologie pour la connaissance des fondements théoriques qui encadrent la traduction du droit. Dans une démarche applicative, la juritraductologie se fixe pour objectif de contribuer à l'amélioration de la qualité des traductions par un travail conjoint entre juristes comparatistes et traducteurs.

Legal translation has been in great demand in the last decade around the world owing to globalization and increased contact and exchange between peoples and states. Naturally, there has been an increased need for legal translators for various purposes, but there has been little research on legal translator training. It is a fact that translating law between any languages is not a straightforward affair. It is commonly acknowledged that legal translation is complex, and it requires special skills, knowledge, and experience on the part of the translator to produce such translation. This essay focuses on legal translation education and the key aspects of the teaching and learning of legal translation. It discusses and defines the key aspects in legal translator training, mapping out the parameters of this new field of translation practice and research. The essay highlights the development of legal translator competence as the core objective of such training programs by identifying and describing the skill base of the legal translator and legal translation competence and proficiency. The author hopes that the discussion will draw more attention to this emerging area of curriculum development and educational research in translation studies.

Translation theories have shifted in focus over the last sixty years: purely linguistic means and methods have been enhanced by sociolinguistic views, pragmatic application, and semiotic approaches. Legal translation is a process in which one dual semiotic system (source law and language) is transmitted into the other dual semiotic system (target law and language). The process of transmission is complex: interpretation by a translator of the source text within the source legal system forms its crucial stage as the translator is able to convey to another language only such information that he or she finds in the source legal text. Although source law and source culture should be adapted in the process of legal translation to target law and target culture respectively in order to be comprehensible for the target language recipients, the culturally rooted message contained in the source legal text, when transposed to the target language text, should reflect to a certain extent its original cultural rootedness. Whether such a requirement can be met depends upon the translator's proficiency and competence in both the source dual semiotic system and the target dual semiotic system.

Résumé L'appréhension du droit international comme langage, notamment par les courants dits postmodernes, a principalement conduit à l'étude de la syntaxe et à celle de la signification. Considérant le caractère évolutif du droit international mais aussi du langage, ces approches ne permettent pas de prendre en compte l'évolution du sens des concepts dans leur utilisation dans le discours et la pratique juridiques. C'est pourquoi, l'étude s'intéresse à l'évolution du récit juridique et à la traduction d'une littéralité témoignant de l'émergence de nouvelles formes de conscience juridique. Tirant les leçons des travaux de Derrida (quant à l'étude de l'itération et de la différance), de Greimas (quant au parcours de la signification) et de Jakobson (sur le rôle de la métonymie), l'approche se veut dynamique et relationnelle et propose d'examiner, en particulier, les cas de syllepse et leurs implications dans l'évolution du langage et de la pratique juridiques. Dans un “système de sens jamais figé,” l'approche d'étude de l'évolution conceptuelle vise à intégrer différents plans d'analyse, dans une perspective à la fois diachronique et synchronique. Le cas d'étude retenu pour illustrer cette approche est celui du concept de personnalité juridique internationale.

China-based missionaries around the mid-nineteenth century played a crucial role in initially rendering legal terms in Western languages into Chinese. A survey of early English-Chinese magazines, dictionaries, and books on law reveals the forms in which the earliest translated legal terms in Chinese assume, calling attention to their marked differences from the same set of terms in Chinese characters that were later borrowed from Japan. The findings about the missionaries’ creative translation activities in China are of cultural and socio-psychological interests to Chinese lawyers, historians, and translators of our time.

This paper explores the process of legal translation aiming to gain an insight into the mechanisms that guarantee the quality of translation for legal work. The first part of the paper introduces static equivalence theory, which was developed by the author and serves as a basic framework under which a legal translator operates. In order to achieve static equivalence between the source and the target languages, the author, based on his several-decades of experience doing pragmatic translation (legal translation in particular) and an in-depth retrospective examination (concept-based), has constructed in the second part of the paper a five-step model for the process of legal translation. The model articulates all the essential steps that a legal translator needs to go through in his work, and the interconnections among them. These steps include (1) browsing the text to determine an applicable translation strategy, (2) perusing the text to decode the writer's intent, (3) conducting operative analysis to select a best way of expression, (4) cross-linguistic transfer, and (5) equivalence check by back-translation.

The specific nature of legal language and the specific challenges posed by legal translation have often led to a claim of untranslatability. In this article, the arguments advanced by both sides of the debate are examined. The difficulties that legal texts present are illustrated by an annotated translation of a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights.

Should fidelity in legal translation be judged in terms of approximation to the source text? What are the possible alternatives? Multilingual jurisdictions see great needs in the translation of texts of the law and tend to be particularly concerned with the uniform application of the law in its different renditions. As a response to new sources of legal indeterminacy created by legal multilingualism, approaches to statutory interpretation in multilingual jurisdictions have shifted in focus. Through analyzing the way linguistic indeterminacy in legislation is resolved in various multilingual jurisdictions, I argue that an understanding of approaches to statutory interpretation can help translators better grasp the nature of the legislative texts they are dealing with and potentially illuminate strategies of legal translation.

Résumé Cet article s'inscrit dans un projet de recherche visant à déterminer si et, le cas échéant, dans quelle mesure ou encore de quelle(s) manière(s) l'étude plus systématique de langue juridique contribuerait à une meilleure connaissance du droit, tel qu'il est entendu traditionnellement, soit comme un “ensemble de règles de conduite socialement édictées et sanctionnées, qui s'imposent aux membres de la société” (Cornu 2011). Cet article, qui s'adresse d'abord aux juristes, a pour objet de décrire certaines des unités phraséologiques verbales du terme responsabilité civile, notamment à partir d'éléments du cadre d'analyse fourni par la théorie Sens-Texte. Après une présentation des postulats de la recherche ainsi que des unités phraséologiques verbales, obtenues au moyen d'une recherche sur corpus, nous tirons sept conclusions qui toutes ou presque nous apparaissent comme des pistes de recherche dont la poursuite est susceptible de contribuer à l'avancement des connaissances en droit.

A police interrogation is goal-oriented, conventionalized with repeated and distinctive features of institutional discourse that arise from its communicative purpose as identified by police officers of the professional community. In China, the written notes of police interrogations are indispensable documents in the prosecution process and are presented as evidential confessions. By comparing the two versions of police interrogations – the written notes and the oral interrogation, that is, the tape-recordings, the paper finds that the written notes do not accurately reflect the whole question-and-answer process. Based on the concept of genre and taking oral police interrogation as a genre in legal settings, this present study regards the written notes as a transgenre, a body of translated legal documents that do not fully comply with textual conventions of either the source or the target text. The present study examines the generic structure and lexical-grammar features of the written notes and the tape-recordings to unravel the transfer inside the genre of police interrogations. From the perspective of semiotics, the paper explores the constraints of other sign systems, such as law, professional culture, and socio-culture on transgenre in police investigative settings.

Disputes and conflicts affect interpersonal relationships. The key factors in resolution are what attitudes people take and what kinds of reconciliation people choose. The paper examines the language of judges from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, specifically Appraisal System. It presents a case study that is a civil one brought to court in Tahe County in China. The case concerns the conflict and dispute between a chicken raiser and his neighbor. The judge resolved the conflicts and disputes, and the two parties were reconciled. The appraisal analysis of the language used by the two parties explains how conflicts and disputes occurred. The appraisal analysis of the judge's language explains how the mediation succeeded in reconciling the conflicts and disputes.

Different courtroom setups embody different semiotic references and reflect different legal cultures. What the spatial setups of the court involve is not only the normal operation of the trial, but also to a large extent the mirroring of the corresponding judicial ideology. Although some studies on trial structures have been conducted by Chinese scholars, it is an uncharted domain in terms of the connection and relationship between courtroom setups and trial structures. To fill in such a gap, the study investigates the courtroom setups in criminal trials from a historical perspective with an aim to give an exact and vivid picture of the peculiar model of the trial structures encoded in the courtroom setups, and explore the rationales for such a model and the pitfalls in judicial practices. It then proposes a preliminary framework for the reform and perfection of the courtroom setups in criminal trials in China so as to adapt to the ideology of trial structure in modern China's criminal cases and also to provide implications for the further amendments of the Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China.