The Importance of the Conceptual Aspect in Legal Translation

Abstract

The diversity of legal systems derives from differences in the division of socio-cultural reality, which requires conceptual elaboration involving a variety of systems and, consequently, terminologies whose unification is difficult. The greatest difficulty with legal translation lies in the non-correspondence of concepts between the source law system and the target law system. Students of foreign languages are taught courses on the general principles of translation. However, legal translation necessarily requires a full command of the legal system and terminology. It should be emphasized that legal terminology does not consist of the study of isolated words, but it is important to consider the conceptual aspects represented by the legal terms. In general, a technical or scientific term has mostly the same universal referent and therefore an exact equivalent in a given language. The legal world operates differently. Each legal system is characterized by its fundamental singularity as it is elaborated in a specific national context and is designed to meet the specific aspirations of a community. For this reason, attention is paid particularly to finding the equivalence of legal terms for which it is difficult to provide equivalents, in view of the considerable differences existing between different legal systems, and thus also among their respective notional systems. For the translator, the task is also to master the terminology and the semantic derivation in order to find a corresponding and satisfying equivalent in the target legal system. Thus, the article aims at presenting some translation strategies that can be used, depending on the actual situation, in legal translation, despite the fact that, sometimes, the result obtained is far from being an ideal solution.