Prepare for take-off: proposing a functionalist, genre-based guideline for legal and institutional translators
Date
2023
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Abstract
There are numerous tools available for legal translators to help them navigate a job's difficulties that simultaneously demand knowledge and expertise in Comparative Law, Translation, and Linguistics. Additionally, the growing trend toward greater interdisciplinarity in Translation Studies (TS) has provided an array of new tools available to aid the translator, primarily due to technological advancements in Computer-Aided Translation tools (CAT tools) over the last few decades. Despite the relative infancy of some of these resources, the extent of their usefulness reaches the highest levels of specialised language, as is the case of highly technical legal translators working in aeronautical law and other specialised fields of legal translation. Moreover, recent studies have shown that resource-related issues, such as a lack of awareness and the mismanagement of digital resources, are unnecessary obstacles for legal translators. The literature review confirms this praxis-related shortcoming, revealing that translators could rapidly employ strategies to overcome salient problems when translating legal texts. Additionally, several studies point to novel technologies, especially digitised corpora, as presenting new avenues of research and as a mode of dealing with translation problems. Thus, the Research Paper aims to answer calls by scholars of Legal- and Corpus-Based and CorpusAssisted Legal Translation Studies (LTS and CBLTS/CALTS) for further investigation into the best accessible approaches and digital resources available to legal-technical translators who lack the ideal expertise. The results indicate that popular Corpus Linguistics software can have numerous helpful applications for the cohort group, especially in specialised legal sub-genres and their corresponding Units of Specialised Meaning (USMs) tasks.
Description
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Translation to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2023
Keywords
Legal translators, Computer-Aided Translation tools, Institutional translators