Rechtstexte übersetzen — leicht gemacht?: Oder: Wie schnell kann man sich beim Übersetzen juristischer Texte verlaufen

The purpose of the paper is twofold: firstly, it analyses the most frequent problems in the translation of legal texts encountered by the university-level students of translation doing the course “The translation of legal texts” and, secondly, it describes the solutions applied. A fundamental difficulty in the translation of legal texts concerns the highly technical subject matter itself. There are important differences between legal systems, each of which has specific norms, as is reflected especially at the lexical level, in the terminology used. Different text genres (for example, legislation, contracts, indictments, legal textbooks, etc.) require different translation approaches and strategies. For students of translation, a particular problem may also be the high level of abstractness of legislative texts, which are among the most complex legal texts. The paper also discusses difficulties which students have with homonyms, synonyms and collocations in the translation of legal texts.