Volumen 46 (2021): Edición 1 (June 2021)

It is generally assumed that a good knowledge of the legal field is a prerequisite to deliver legal translations. This paper will challenge this assumption by presenting a case study with third-year bachelor’s students who participated in a translation project. The students, enrolled in a course in translation practice, were trained in corpus consultation at the beginning of the academic year. Nearly at the end, they translated an extract of a supply contract without being trained in the legal field. They consulted a pre-compiled offline corpus and online bilingual dictionaries. The paper findings highlight that knowledge of the legal field would have certainly helped the students make more informed decisions and avoid some mistranslations. However, the major shortcomings were actually due to ineffective corpus or dictionary consultation. In particular, formulaic expressions and collocations were neglected. In light of the paper findings, it can be speculated that in translation training, effective corpus consultation may help users deliver high-quality legal translations. It also seemed that thorough knowledge of the legal field is not a prerequisite, at least as far as short texts are concerned.

The present study examines Arabic legal phraseology formation from the standpoint of positive law and jurisprudence. It claims that phraseological constructions in Arabic legislative and statutory texts are largely influenced by the translation process of Roman law texts. However, scholarly literature still relies to some extent on formulae used in the Islamic jurisprudence. To illustrate this, three examples of legal principles anchored in Islamic jurisprundence, known as legal maxims, are subjected to a comparative analysis and discussed along with their corresponding expressions in positive law in modern-day Arabic. Ultimately, the purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, to demonstrate that the phraseology present in many Arabic positive laws is fully adapted to corresponding formulations in the Roman law, steming from a historical translation process that accompanied the codification movement in the beginning of the 20th century; secondly, to emphasize the significance of textual genre awareness in legal translation. Concretely, the introductory section provides an overview of recent studies that have addressed legal phraseologisms. It is followed by a section on the historical role of translation in the construction of certain phraseologisms. The general legal principles of (a) burden of proof, (b) presumption of innocence, and (c) the pacta sunt servanda principle are then examined in order to shed light on the influence of both the Civilist tradition and Islamic jurisprudence on the use of legal Arabic today, as well as to demonstrate how the translation of phraseologisms is dependent on the parameters of genre. The analysis leads to the conclusion that proper use of phraseologisms, whether in drafting or translation, is closely linked to knowledge of phraseology formation and the historical influence of translation.

Multilingual writing of European directives is faced with a few linguistic difficulties, like choosing an appropriate legal terms. All linguistic versions shall reflect the same content event though the legal system of each Member State is different and some legal concept do not have an equivalent in other legal systems. In this way, legal writing of European Directive is a very complex subject both from legal and linguistic perspective. The aim of this article is to discuss different linguistics difficulties that could appear during the harmonisation of criminal proceedings in European Union, where multilingualism is a key value and to analyse the possible solutions, when dealing with those difficulties. It seems that even if multilingualism is a big challenge to European Union, it could have a positive influence on the quality of European legislation.

The subject of the analysis is linguaculture expressing linguistic and cultural differences occurring in every language of law. They relate to vocabulary and editing principles of law acts. It seems that preserving such differences in the target translation makes it possible to reveal specific legislation trends of a given country, which express political motivation. Their preservation in the translated text requires good knowledge of law and in-depth comparative analysis. The focus of the analysis in this text is on the expression of gender in the law texts and specifically, on the translation of feminatives and legal names relevant for cultural dimension of a given law system.