ABSTRACT
Since the 1950’s, translating legal texts has gained momentum in an increasingly globalised world. International organisations, the European Union, corporations, international and national courts, companies and private individuals have increasingly been relying on all types of legal translations. They include rules of law with most of them leading to legal consequences. How should the translator deal with legal texts? How to assess whether s/he is experienced enough to face the complexity of a semantic transfer when s/he translates texts from a source law to another target law?
This chapter explains new advances in juritraductology (the science of translating legal texts) and gives examples of how they might be used in legal translation. The first phase is to highlight the specificities of a legal translation by suggesting a method for assessing its level of legal complexity. The second phase describes the 3-step methodology of a legal translation – a first semasiological step, a second step based on comparative law and a last onomasiological step – and is exemplified by examples taken from Common Law and the French law.
Our demonstration combines legal theory and legal translation practice and aims at providing researchers, translators and teachers with the know-how needed to complete the entire translation process of a legal text.
