A Legal Translator’s Reality

“The problem that legal translation is not viewed as a profession compared with an airline pilot or doctor, for example…"

Translators out of English, on the other hand, need to recognise these and more than likely simplify them in their target language, as continental systems avoid synonymy and a redundant translation would be confusing to a continental lawyer.

To put any fears to bed, Łucja asserted that legal translators are unlikely to be replaced by machine translation and post-editors soon, not least because of confidentiality issues and the lack of parallel corpora to train software.

Łucja proceeded to tackle some of the facets within legal translation that we need to
consider

the wide usage of synonyms

par/nominal/face value, for example

the legal vs. semi-legal nature of terms, variation
in terminology for civil and criminal procedure,
geographical variations

UK vs. US law or even English and Welsh law vs. Scots law

terms
and their collates

such as to bring an action and to file a lawsuit

Delegates were
introduced to examples of set legal formula

e.g. in witness whereof

Legal translation is the “ultimate linguistic challenge […] combining the inventiveness of literary translation with the terminological precision of technical translation,”

The challenges can be categorized

legal system-specific

incongruity of legal terms and difference between legal systems

language-specific

semantic differences
between languages

translation-specific

constraints of bilingual processing such as
interference, simplification and explicitation

In the case of translation into or out of English, legal translation is often an operation between two languages as well as two legal systems

“Our profession is based on knowledge and experience. It has the longest apprenticeship of any profession. Not until thirty do you start to be useful as a translator; not until fifty do you start to be in your prime.”

“An acceptable legal translation is one that contains correctly translated terms, utterances that have been translated correctly according to their pragmatic function, and textual conventions that are familiar to the intended readers of target texts and conform with target-language genre conventions” (Nielsen 2010: 33)