Legal Translation: Facile or Arduous?

Abstract

Legal translation is considered as one of the most challenging fields of translation. Legal language inherent to the field and the differences in legal practices combined with the respective cultures create a conundrum to the translator. The study focuses on problems encountered by translators during the process of translating legal documents such as affidavits, judgments, deeds, and law reports from English to Sinhalese and vice versa. A comparative analysis of selected texts of law and their translations was conducted to discern the problems of translation. Further, informal discussions with professionals involved in the field of legal translation were carried out to augment the outcome. The garnered data were classified into three subcategories as Syntactic, Semantic and Cultural. Under each category, a plethora of difficulties was were identified. Unusual sentence structures, word order, model verbs are few problems recognized under the syntactic category whilst semantic issues included terminology, wordiness, redundancy, loan words, neologisms and the lack of an established terminology. The culture entwined with the legal system of the respective country or community was also identified as an area of asperity due to the differences in traditions, norms, faiths and doctrines.