Abstract:
No doubt that translation has been once and remains nowadays one of the most required and inescapable disciplines since it is becoming more important in an ever-more globalised world, and also because it plays a major role as a means which bridges languages, cultures, and all kinds of fields. That’s why, it deserves to be studied and taught across all the universities as an independent discipline. No one can ignore neither its omnipresence, nor its benefits to various fields for instance, literary works, scientific meetings, languages teaching, and legal documents. Taking for example the case of Law, either being a science or a phenomenon, it is defined as a system of rules established by a governing authority to institute and maintain orderly coexistence. It does also prescribe duty and regulate the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties. Since every science or discipline disposes of its own terminology and its own lexis; similarly, law has its own specialised language which is characterised by legal terms and technical vocabulary where words with common use acquire other meanings and change into terms which are more specialized, once in the legal language than their use before in the common language. Hence, Legal language can be defined as special purpose communicationbetween specialists, thereby excluding communication between lawyers and non-lawyer. Thus, translating law is not a simple task to accomplish, the main reason of that is due to the fact of divergence existing between the legal systems. So the translator here is not dealing just with specialised words, but rather with two different systems and any mistranslation can lead to a lawsuit or loss of money. That’s why, legal translation requires a qualified, specialised and experienced translator in order to reduce the probabilities of any failure that may occur when conveying a legal text from a source language into a target language. It goes without saying that a legal translator, even though professional and experienced can always face some difficulties during his work, such as ambiguous words, technical terminology or being unable to find equivalents to some concepts that do not concur in both legal systems. In addition to all these obstacles, another linguistic phenomenon could bother the translator, it is called: “Collocation”. This linguistic phenomenon designates a class of word groups that lies between idioms and free word combinations. Idiomatic expressions are those in which the semantics of the whole cannot be deduced from the meanings of the individual constituents. Free word combinations have the properties that each of the words can be replaced by another without seriously modifying the overall meaning of the composite unit and if one of the words is omitted, a reader cannot easily infer it from the remaining ones.