ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the translation decisions informed by analysis of the source text at a textual level, that is at a level beyond the individual sentence. The additional difficulty involves avoiding terms that are appropriately legal, but have negative connotations, such as ‘sentence’, and maybe even ‘judgement’. In order to capture the legal metaphor in the English translation, any formal equivalence has to give way to tone and meaning. The relatively more frequent provision of the connectors in German, at least in narrative and analytical genres, is also well illustrated by the phrase ‘denn auch’. Translation problems at the textual level can emerge when, as frequently occurs, literal translation would affect the textual function of the target text negatively.
