Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017

The English translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure ( Gialuz, Lupária, and Scarpa 2014 ) represents a step forward in fostering judicial and police cooperation in Europe. This is made possible by making the content of the Code accessible to a wide English-speaking audience. Given the informative purpose of the translation ( Cao 2007 ), whose intended readers are mainly European citizens, the target language chosen by the translation team is European English, i.e. the English used in European Union texts, the international English used in Council of Europe texts, the English found in the translations of the Codes of Criminal Procedure of other European countries and the English used by law scholars ( Scarpa, Peruzzo, and Pontrandolfo 2014 ).

The European continent is a multidimensional and multilayered legal reality in which different languages co-exist and legal transplants and terminological transfers are commonplace. Based on such premises, however, the embeddedness of the Code of Criminal Procedure in the Italian legal system poses several translation difficulties, especially in the search for supranational/international English translation equivalents for terms that refer to nationally developed legal concepts. For these terms, established translation equivalents are not necessarily available. The aims of this paper are threefold: to describe the features of the interdisciplinary translation team consisting of ten members (linguists and lawyers), to lay out the peculiarities of the translation process in which professionals with a different background were involved, and to illustrate the methodology applied as regards terminological choices. To do so, a concrete example from the translated text will be provided to lay out the challenges faced and the solution adopted by the translation team.

The present study uses the notion of frames as a model of concept representation to map the investigation process in three criminal justice realities: the Algerian, Egyptian and French Criminal Procedure. Specifically, the mapping of the investigating process is carried out with the aim of examining conceptual variations when national laws interact with one another and highlighting problems of contextualization in translation. The study shows that, when considering legal translation from an international perspective, all instances of reciprocal connection between laws and international multilingual legal communication should be examined in order to present relevant contextual variables in translation. This approach brings to light specificities at the procedural level that the legal translator and legal expert must be aware of in determining the translation situation, if conceptual inaccuracies, terminological discrepancies and awkward calques are to be avoided.

In this article, I propose a methodological specification of the concept of cultural translation as a heuristic tool, with which to gain a better understanding of what is at stake when law “travels” across legal cultures, from one society to another. Applied to the transposition of indigenous rights to different Indonesian contexts and locales, the proposed methodological specification reveals a paradoxical shift that occurs in the course of this transposition, not so much in terms of the legal content of indigenous rights, but with regard to their institutional framework and intended target communities.

Translation competence is the ability to comprehend the source of oral or written text accurately in the same way the producer intends to deliver the message, and then accurately, and in the proper style, re-express the meanings in the target language. Legal translation competence is the ability to translate faithfully in the legal context. Analyzing the concept of legal translation competence helps to identify curricular objectives and curriculum designs for training legal translation professionals. This paper examines key teaching objectives of training legal translators in Chinese context, by using the Q-methodology.

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the translation errors made by prospective legal translation trainees, with a special focus on the (mis)use of legal terminology and phraseology. The investigation relies on the data produced and collected within a wider empirical study on the translation problems faced by a cohort of translation graduates with no specialisation in legal translation on the one hand, and a cohort of linguistically-skilled lawyers with no translation-related qualifications on the other, who translated the same criminal law document from English into Italian. The translation errors made by the two cohorts have been classified on the basis of the categories proposed by Mossop (2014) and assessed following the severity scale devised by Vollmar (2001) . The Translation Quality Index (cf. Schiaffino and Zearo 2006 ) thus obtained has allowed for the ranking of the participants in the five quality levels identified for legal translation by Prieto Ramos (2014) . The findings of the quantitative and qualitative analyses of errors are also traced back to the participants’ translation process by triangulating data from the different collection methods used within the empirical study, i.e. screen recording, keystroke logging and questionnaires, with particular reference to time and reference material use. The specific design of this investigation, which considers the participants’ prior education as additional variable, allows for the identification of a possible correlation between the different backgrounds of the translators and the quality of their translations, with general consequences on the conceptualisation of legal translation competence and effective training.

Legal texts place particular demands on the reader owing to the institutionalized communication situation, their abstract content and language, and the indirect connection of the utterances with the extralinguistic and extralegal world. Most legal translators are not legal experts. Therefore, accessing the meaning of legal argumentation represents a major challenge, especially as legal translators mainly have to comprehend and translate texts issuing from a foreign legal system with its own legal language and terminology. With the aim of explaining the particular difficulties of legal text understanding and translation, this article takes up some general theoretical approaches of mental organization of word knowledge and speech comprehension developed in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics. These general models are adapted to the understanding of legal text comprehension, focusing on the mental representation of highly abstract legal language and legal arguing. On that basis, a cognitive-translational model of legal text understanding is developed. Finally the use of the model is discussed as a theoretical contribution to legal translator training and with regard to the particular position of the legal translator within the communication process.

Este artículo presenta los resultados de un análisis empírico de un encargo de revisión profesional de una traducción jurídica en la combinación español-italiano.

Siguiendo la metodología empleada por Künzli (2007) , el material objeto de análisis se basa en las revisiones bilingües, comparativas y pragmáticas ( Parra 2005 , 13–26), comentadas y justificadas mediante un cuestionario, de una sentencia dictada por un órgano judicial español.

Los grupos de profesionales, todos italianos nativos, que participaron en el estudio fueron: a) juristas lingüistas; b) traductores profesionales con una especialización en traducción jurídica; c) traductores con una sólida experiencia en el ámbito profesional, pero mínima en el campo jurídico; d) juristas.

Los resultados consideran los siguientes elementos: tiempo, aceptabilidad y calidad de la revisión; cantidad y tipologías de errores; intervenciones de revisión; acciones de revisión; recursos y herramientas; comentarios acerca del proceso de revisión.