Translating Legal Texts: Bridge between Systems and Cultures

Abstract

Translating legal texts is much more than transferring a message from one language to another. The language is a reflection of the legal system of a country, which reflects the history, culture, all laws, and legal norms of that country. The differences between legal systems and cultures affect the translation and the transfer of the legal force of all concepts, regulations, and the application of laws into the target language.
The subject of analysis of this thesis is the translation of legal texts, specifically court judgments as legal text. The analysis includes lexical and morphosyntactic characteristics, the structure and composition of the texts, in order to find the significant features that influence the translation. Furthermore, there is analysis of the legal systems to which the texts belong and their characteristics, as well as what differences between the systems affect the interpretation of the legal text. The goal is to compare the translation of court judgments from two legal systems in terms of the structure and composition of the legal text, the lexical characteristics, the morphosyntactic characteristics, and the differences between the legal systems.
The analysis is on samples of court judgments in criminal law taken from the judiciaries of Italy and the United Kingdom. At the end of the analysis, the possibilities for translation equivalence when translating a court judgment from a civil law system and the possibilities for translation equivalence when translating a court judgment from a Common law system are presented.