Abstract:
Abstract
This study was aimed at investigating the actual practice of translating legal documents.
Specifically, an attempt has been made to identify the major challenges that translators
encounter in the process of legal document translation; to describe the practice of translation of
legal documents employed by the legal document translator and to investigate strategies they
used to cope up the problem they encounter. To address these issues, Document analysis was
used as major data gathering tool while interview was used as supplementary tool. Convenience
sampling was employed as a sampling technique. The qualitative data was then analyzed
thematically by focusing on different linguistic feature. The findings revealed that translators
rendered the source text to the target text without fully understanding what exactly the source
texts meant. As a result, it creates a communication gap between the readers. Besides, the
findings showed that the translators did not use a proper equivalent meaning for the translated
text. As a result, the quality of translation reduced. The findings further indicated that the
challenges that translators encountered during the practice of English-Amharic and AmharicEnglish translation included the use of technical terms, long sentences (complex sentence) and
redundant words/phrases in the source texts. In order to cope up with such challenges,
translators are found to employ different strategies of translation. The strategies included
borrowing, modulation and equivalence .Considering this, I recommend that translation should
be given as a field of study like other fields and translators should be responsible and avoid
negligence in their work. Furthermore, translators should have language ability in both the
source language and target language
