Legal Translation Explained

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.

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.

From microbiology to nuclear physics and chemistry to software engineering, scientific and technical translation is a complex activity that involves communicating specialized information on a variety of subjects across multiple languages. It requires expert linguistic knowledge and writing skills, combined with the ability to research and understand complex concepts and present them to a range of different audiences. Using a combination of interdisciplinary research, real-world examples drawn from professional practice and numerous learning activities, this introductory textbook equips the student with the knowledge and skills needed to get started in this exciting and challenging field. It examines the origins and history of scientific and technical translation, and the people, tools and processes involved in translating scientific and technical texts. Scientific and Technical Translation Explained provides an overview of the main features of scientific and technical discourse as well as the different types of documents produced. A series of detailed case studies highlight various translation challenges and introduce a range of strategies for dealing with them. A variety of resources and exercises are included to make learning effective and enjoyable. Additional resources and activities are available on Facebook.

Over the last 30 years there has been a substantial increase in the study of the history of translation. Both well-known and lesser-known specialists in translation studies have worked tirelessly to give the history of translation its rightful place. Clearly, progress has been made, and the history of translation has become a viable independent research area. This book aims at claiming such autonomy for the field with a renewed vigour. It seeks to explore issues related to methodology as well as a variety of discourses on history with a view to laying the groundwork for new avenues, new models, new methods. It aspires to challenge existing theoretical and ideological frameworks. It looks toward the future of history. It is an attempt to address shortcomings that have prevented translation history from reaching its full disciplinary potential. From microhistory, archaeology, periodization, to issues of subjectivity and postmodernism, methodological lacunae are being filled. Contributors to this volume go far beyond the text to uncover the role translation has played in many different times and settings such as Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle-east and Asia from the 6th century to the 20th. These contributions, which deal variously with the discourses on methodology and history, recast the discipline of translation history in a new light and pave the way to the future of research and teaching in the field.

Machine translation (MT) has made huge strides in the last few decades. In the legal field, however, there are only a few academic works dedicated to exploring how MT can be successfully applied in legal translation practice. There is currently a gap in the literature that concerns studies on the automated translation of legal documents drawn up by international law firms and/or tackled by legal translators. This book bridges this gap by providing an in-depth analysis of MT in legal practice. It explores whether, and to what extent, MT can be considered reliable, or at least acceptable, in the legal field and in legal practice. It investigates whether MT target texts can be used as drafts to be processed further (i.e., post-edited), how we might tackle MT’s shortcomings, and how MT tools could be supplemented with other language resources.

An Introduction to Court Interpreting has been carefully designed to be comprehensive, accessible and globally applicable. Starting with the history of the profession and covering the key topics from the role of the interpreter in the judiciary setting to ethical principles and techniques of interpreting, this text has been thoroughly revised. The new material covers: remote interpreting and police interpreting; role-playing scenarios including the Postville case of 2008; updated and expanded resources. In addition, the extensive practical exercises and suggestions for further reading help to ensure this remains the essential introductory textbook for all courses on court interpreting

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.

The field of Legal translation and interpreting has strongly expanded over recent years. As it has developed into an independent branch of Translation Studies, this book advocates for a substantiated discussion of methods and methodology, as well as knowledge about the variety of approaches actually applied in the field. It is argued that, complex and multifaceted as it is, legal translation calls for research that might cross boundaries across research approaches and disciplines in order to shed light on the many facets of this social practice. The volume addresses the challenge of methodological consolidation, triangulation and refinement. The work presents examples of the variety of theoretical approaches which have been developed in the discipline and of the methodological sophistication which is currently being called for. In this regard, by combining different perspectives, they expand our understanding of the roles played by legal translators and interpreters, who emerge as linguistic and intercultural mediators dealing with a rich variety of legal texts; as knowledge communicators and as builders of specialised knowledge; as social agents performing a socially-situated activity; as decision-makers and agents subject to and redefining power relations, and as political actors shaping legal cultures and negotiating cultural identities, as well as their own professional identity. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.