Features Of Legal Translation

Translation is “the process of changing something that is written or spoken into another language” (Oxford Advanced American Dictionary, n.d). Translation has an important role as it serves to approach different cultures and civilizations within each other which enhances mutual exchange for information and creates a kind of universal knowledge all over the world. Obviously, there are many types of translational fields which include: political translation, economic translation, legal translation and … etc. It is known that legal translation is considered the most complex type of translation as it has certain form and style in writing in each language. According to Cao,” it is the rendering of legal texts from the SL into the TL or a translation

The Study of legal language with respect to word level.

Legal language is specialized with certain lexical features that lead to a diversity in the legal vocabulary types. As Alcaraz and Hughes have noted, translators found that there are certain terms in the legal field that are existed in other field with different meaning since they are very large in number, the translator has to be acquainted by their different meanings in different context. (Alcaraz & Hughes, 2002, p.17,18). Thus, translator will face a problem on this level unless he has an experience in the legal field through examining different kinds of resolutions and declarations in both Arabic and English.

A. Lexical features.

‘Legalese’, which is the language of law, is considered a unique language that has its own lexical features. These features cause a kind of complexity and rigidness in understanding the legal document easily and they include:

1. Archaic

So the status scale between them is great, for instance, the documents that admit the high-level relations between two countries. These should be very formal. Likewise the declarations and resolutions issued from the organizations on the United Nations and the international conventions. Formality is an essential feature in law since the formality scale in the sociolinguistics is very high as the verdicts issued from any kind of court. Undoubtedly, the court is the most formal place in any country, thus its documents must be formal written in the high variety of a language. High variety of a language means the formal way of a language that is not used in everyday