ABSTRACT
Schumacher said that ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher 1973) and it is all to do with economy. Small is certainly important. Ask any parent and they will tell you. The tinier the baby, the more the care and attention expended. The fewer the words, the greater the burden of meaning. In terms of translation, the tiny documents are often of life or death import. They may mean the difference between a divorce settlement worth millions of pounds or a settlement of paltry thousands, between asylum and repatriation, between prison and freedom. They are small, they may not strictly speaking be diffi cult to do, but they bear no context. Passports and birth and marriage certifi cates may have been crushed in transport, muddied and smudged. The offi cial authenticating stamp may have blotted out the all too important date, and offi cials almost never sign legibly. But they are the bread and butter of many a beginner translator’s career, and they mean a great deal to the client. A translator who deals with this type of document is, in effect, a specialist legal translator, and, like a legal interpreter, holds the client’s fate in his or her hands: birth certifi cates and household registration papers mean the difference between staying and leaving, while marriage certifi cates and receipts may help to decide a divorce. Not only is the content crucial, but so too is the form of this type of document. Just as a law or regulation has illocutionary force (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of legal translation as speech act), so a certifi cate is a kind of speech act. A situation or status is stated in writing in a certain form of words, therefore it must be so. This kind of ceremonial expression and the formal layout of a certifi cate legalise the status of the person or people named in the certifi cate.
