Textual Fidelity Challenges For Beginners In Legal Translation Practices

Résumé: This article examines the issue of textual literalism as a barrier to translating legal documents for Algerian beginner translators. It argues against the assumptions that impose strict literalism in legal translation as being adopted by novice translators. In the same token, legal translation is subject to limitations within restricted stylistic and syntactic scopes, where the aim is to reach literal equivalence that is identical to the source text’s qualitative features. This issue is investigated by two methods; first, through Leon Wolff’s “textual fidelity” and “equivalent effect”; second, through a qualitative study conducted on beginner translators: that is, legal beginner translators at the office of translation in Rouiba, Algiers. This study revealed that the translation of the target text poses difficulties at the semantic level, where the focus is mainly put on the written form rather than meaning. This study argues that the majority of trainee translators' productions do not go beyond the linguistic patterns of the source text.

Publié dans la revue: Cahiers de Traduction