In an interview with a translator who specialises in legal texts, Andrea Fleming, a freelance journalist from Munich, explains what makes a good legal translation.
"... whatever one may say of the inadequacy of translation, it is and remains one of the most important and worthy transactions in the general world traffic," this is what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reportedly said of the struggle to transfer a text from one language to another.
Legal translation is a genre of its own and when translators of legal texts talk about their work, it quickly becomes clear that they could not do their job professionally without having extensive legal expertise themselves. Many translators of legal texts therefore not only have a special affinity for the language from which they translate, have usually lived for a time in the country of the source language or even moved there, but also come from the legal field, have completed a second degree in law or benefit from an education in law studies.
Asked about particular challenges, one colleague describes the fundamentally different facts arising from the different legal systems in the source and target languages. As an example, from her practice, she cites the transfer of written pleadings dealing with American real estate law: there is often no equivalent in German law for the legal and administrative formalities that have to be completed in the United States, for example, when buying real estate. How does she approach this challenge? If she cannot find a real equivalent in the target language, she will try to describe the facts as briefly and precisely as possible. Sometimes she also uses the term from the source language in brackets, and in an emergency, she even works with footnotes. However, the basic prerequisite for any solution chosen by a translator in such cases is a precise knowledge of both legal situations in the source and target languages. As a rule, this means extensive research. In addition, many translators are well networked in their specialist field, consult experts, and often seek direct contact with informants who are professionally active in the field and can explain complex specialist issues.
"I sometimes pick up the phone and ask the client or the agency's project coordinator, or talk to professionals in the industry who can explain certain terms or issues in their field of expertise," says one translator.
But how do you recognize a good, successful legal translation? The legal language is characterized by high precision but also by complex sentence structure and sometimes complicated causal relationships. As banal as it may sound: the first prerequisite for a good translation is that the translator understands the text content, the facts. Basic legal knowledge and often also specific expertise in the specific subject area of the text is essential. When translating from a foreign language, it quickly becomes clear whether a translator is not only familiar with the usual German legal formulations, but also whether he or she has understood the legal facts at stake. But then there are certain subtleties that distinguish an experienced translator and that only those who understand both the source and target language can recognise. Usually translators can judge this better from texts written by colleagues than from their own. "How can I tell if a colleague has done a good job? These don't have to be big factual questions, sometimes I can see that even in small stylistic peculiarities: this applies, for example, to the transmission of typical doublings in English, for which there is no equivalent in German legal language. The English phrase "contract by and between" would probably only be translated in German as "Vertrag zwischen". Or if English contracts initially contain so-called "WHEREAS" sentences, a German contract will instead begin with a preamble", as a specialist translator puts it.
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