This book aims to present an account of legal translation between English and Arabic. The primary objective, therefore, is to analyse the common features of legal discourse in both languages, be they lexical, syntactic, or textual. Analysing the features of legal Arabic; contrasting them with the features of legal English is a pioneering step in the study of legal discourse. Such a comparison will help us come up with a list of the similarities and differences between both languages. This paves the way to figuring out the common difficult linguistic areas that a translator needs to consider when translating legal discourse between both languages. In undertaking this investigation the book offers a broad set of topics that will benefit many readers such as contrastive linguists, researchers undertaking contrastive English/ Arabic research, researchers in the field of translation in general and in legal translation in particular, translation professionals and academics who are teaching translation modules for undergraduate and postgraduate students. These are the topics that the book offers:

• a brief account of the historical background of legal translation and its presentation in the literature

• a thorough account of the features of English and Arabic legal discourse supported by corpus-analysis

areas (for example Shariʿah Law terms, archaic terms, modal auxiliaries among others)1

I will adopt a contrastive approach to analyse the techniques used in translating an authentic Arabic-English-Arabic parallel corpus. The reason why I have chosen to analyse texts from both directions is two-fold: (i) to arrive at some reliable results and commonalities by looking at one element from both directions; (ii) if one looks at the translation from one direction, there is a possibility of the interference of the stylistic preferences from either language, so an attempt to avoid such a possibility is also in mind.