Legal Translation: Modern Challenges and Theories

Translation of any type of technical and specialized texts inevitably faces with specific terminological challenges, most of which can be solved through documented searches or consulting the related experts. But legal translation deals with greater and more serious difficulties, because such kind of translations has legal consequences like a contractual relation which entails moral or financial commitments from both parties. Therefore, a translator of legal texts besides recognition of related words, expressions and phrases, must have enough legal information as well, because other than the mentioned legal consequences, defect and weakness in this regard make it much more difficult to understand the original text and naturally leads into a defective and unparallel translation. In this article first we present the works and ideas of contemporary theorists of legal translation including Edmond Cari Vujan Claud Jemar, then we study the challenges of legal translation including terminology and phrasing, ambiguity in legal texts, documentation and a multi-disciplinary approach. The case study is the translation of legal texts from French to English and Spanish.