This is an examination of legal translation in its many facets from an interdisciplinary perspective, covering both theoretical and practical grounds and linguistic as well as legal issues. The text analyses the basic skills and competence of the legal translator and various types of legal texts.

The translation of law has played an integral part in the interaction among nations in history and is playing a greater role in our increasingly interconnected world today. The book investigates legal translation in its many facets as an intellectual pursuit and a profession. It examines legal translation from an interdisciplinary perspective, covering theoretical and practical grounds and linguistic as well as legal issues. It analyses legal translation competence and various types of legal texts including contracts, statutes and multilateral legal instruments, presents a comparative analysis of the Common Law and the Civil Law and examines the case law from Canada, Hong Kong and the European Court of Justice. It attempts to demonstrate that translating law is a complex act that can enrich law, culture and human experience as a whole.

This long needed reference on the innumerable and increasing ways that the law intersects with translation and interpreting features essays by scholars and professions from the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, and Sweden. The essays range from sophisticated treatments of historical and hence philosophical variations in concept and practice to detailed practical advice on self-education. Essays show a particular concern for the challenges of courtroom discourse when the parties not only use different languages but operate from different cultural and legal traditions.

One of the first attempts to present a comprehensive study of legal translation, this book is an interdisciplinary study in law and translation theory. It is not bound to any specific languages or legal systems, although emphasis is placed on translation between common law and civil law jurisdictions. The main focus is on the translation of texts which are authoritative sources of the law; examples are cited primarily from statutes, codes and constitutions (Canada, Switzerland and Belgium), as well as instruments of the European Union and international treaties and conventions. Dealing with theoretical as well as practical aspects of the subject matter, the author analyses legal translation as an act of communication in the mechanism of the law, thus making it necessary to redefine the goal of legal translation. This book is intended for both lawyers and linguists, translation theorists, legal translators and drafters, legal lexicographers, as well as teachers and students of translation.

Arabic-English-Arabic Legal Translation provides a groundbreaking investigation of the issues found in legal translation between Arabic and English. Drawing on a contrastive-comparative approach, it analyses parallel authentic legal documents in both Arabic and English to examine the features of legal discourse in both languages and uncover the different translation techniques used. In so doing, it addresses the following questions: What are the features of English and Arabic legal texts? What are the similarities and differences of English and Arabic legal texts? What are the difficult areas of legal translation between English and Arabic legal texts? What are the techniques for translating these difficult areas on the lexical and syntactic levels? Features include: A thorough description of the features of legal translation in both English and Arabic, drawing on empirical new research, corpus data analysis and strategic two-way comparisons between source texts and target texts Coverage of a broad range of topics including an outline of the chosen framework for data analysis, a historical survey of legal discourse developments in both Arabic and English and detailed analyses of legal literature at both the lexical and syntactic levels Attention to common areas of difficulty such as Shariah Law terms, archaic terms and model auxiliaries Many examples and excerpts from a wide selection of authentic legal documents, reinforced by practical discussion points, exercises and practice drills to encourage active engagement with the material and opportunities for hands-on learning. Wide-ranging, scholarly and thought-provoking, this will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates on Arabic, Translation Studies and Comparative Linguistics courses. It will also be essential reading for translation professionals and researchers working in the field.

Human rights law and the legal protection of women from violence are still fairly new concepts. As a result, substantial discrepancies exist between what is decided in the halls of the United Nations and what women experience on a daily basis in their communities. Human Rights and Gender Violence is an ambitious study that investigates the tensions between global law and local justice. As an observer of UN diplomatic negotiations as well as the workings of grassroots feminist organizations in several countries, Sally Engle Merry offers an insider's perspective on how human rights law holds authorities accountable for the protection of citizens even while reinforcing and expanding state power. Providing legal and anthropological perspectives, Merry contends that human rights law must be framed in local terms to be accepted and effective in altering existing social hierarchies. Gender violence in particular, she argues, is rooted in deep cultural and religious beliefs, so change is often vehemently resisted by the communities perpetrating the acts of aggression. A much-needed exploration of how local cultures appropriate and enact international human rights law, this book will be of enormous value to students of gender studies and anthropology alike.

Focusing on the problems of translating English legal language, Alcaraz and Hughes offer a wide-ranging view of one of the most demanding and vital areas of contemporary translation practice. Individual chapters deal with legal English as a linguistic system, special concepts in the translation of legal English, the genres of legal translation, and offer a series of practical problems together with discussions of proposed solutions, as well as insight into the pragmatic ways translators go about finding solutions. The numerous examples and discussions of specific terms make the book useful both as a manual in the translation class and as an invaluable reference work for students, teachers, self-learners and professional translators.

This volume investigates advances in the field of legal translation both from a theoretical and practical perspective, with professional and academic insights from leading experts in the field. Part I of the collection focuses on the exploration of legal translatability from a theoretical angle. Covering fundamental issues such as equivalence in legal translation, approaches to legal translation and the interaction between judicial interpretation and legal translation, the authors offer contributions from philosophical, rhetorical, terminological and lexicographical perspectives. Part II focuses on the analysis of legal translation from a practical perspective among different jurisdictions such as China, the EU and Japan, offering multiple and pluralistic viewpoints. This book presents a collection of studies in legal translation which not only provide the latest international research findings among academics and practitioners, but also furnish us with a new approach to, and new insights into, the phenomena and nature of legal translation and legal transfer. The collection provides an invaluable reference for researchers, practitioners, academics and students specialising in law and legal translation, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and semiotics.

This volume examines the linguistic problems that arise in efforts to translate between law and the social sciences. We usually think of "translation" as pertaining to situations involving distinct languages such as English and Swahili. But realistically, we also know that there are many kinds of English or Swahili, so that some form of translation may still be needed even between two people who both speak English-including, for example, between English speakers who are members of different professions. Law and the social sciences certainly qualify as disciplines with quite distinctive language patterns and practices, as well as different orientations and goals. In coordinated papers that are grounded in empirical research, the volume contributors use careful linguistic analysis to understand how attempts to translate between different disciplines can misfire in systematic ways. Some contributors also point the way toward more fruitful translation practices. The contributors to this volume are members of an interdisciplinary working group on Legal Translation that met for a number of years. The group includes scholars from law, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, political science, psychology, and religious studies. The members of this group approach interdisciplinary communication as a form of "translation" between distinct disciplinary languages (or, "registers"). Although it may seem obvious that professionals in different fields speak and think differently about the world, in fact experts in law and in social science too often assume that they can communicate easily when they are speaking what appears to be the "same" language. While such experts may intellectually understand that they differ regarding their fundamental assumptions and uses of language, they may nonetheless consistently underestimate the degree to which they are actually talking past one another. This problem takes on real-life significance when one of the fields is law, where how knowledge is conveyed can affect how justice is meted out.

This book is a survey of how law, language and translation overlap with concepts, crimes and conflicts. It is a transdisciplinary survey exploring the dynamics of colonialism and the globalization of crime. Concepts and conflicts are used here to mean ‘conflicting interpretations’ engendering real conflicts. Beginning with theoretical issues and hermeneutics in chapter 2, the study moves on to definitions and applications in chapter 3, introducing cattle stealing as a comparative theme and global case study in chapter 4. Cattle stealing is also known in English as ‘rustling, duffing, raiding, stock theft, lifting and predatorial larceny.’ Crime and punishment are differently perceived depending on cultures and legal systems: ‘Captain Starlight’ was a legendary ‘duffer’; in India ‘lifting’ a sacred cow is a sacrilegious act. Following the globalization of crime, chapter 5 deals with human rights, ethnic cleansing and genocide. International treaties in translation set the scene for two world wars. Introducing ‘unequal treaties’ (e.g. Hong Kong), chapter 6 highlights disasters caused by treaties in translation. Cases feature American Indians (the ‘trail of broken treaties’), Maoris (Treaty of Waitangi) and East Africa (Treaty of Wuchale).