An Investigation of Translation: The Case of Legal Documents

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