Impact of Culture-Bound Legal Terms on Intersystemic Equivalence in Comparative Legal Translation
Abstract
The growing intensity of interlegal and intercultural interaction in the field of law necessitates the study of mechanisms for adequate transmission of culturally specific legal terms. The study aimed to determine the regularities of reproduction of legal concepts related to specific cultural and legal contexts in the process of translation between different legal systems. The comparative analysis of three term-centric corpora in the language pairs English–German, English–French, and English–Albanian was conducted using the methods of comparative terminology research and recording of translation strategies. The study established that culturally specific terms pose a translation challenge due to the lack of direct functional equivalents in many legal systems. The study determined that the level of intersystemic equivalence directly depends on the kinship of legal systems: the highest rates were recorded for language pairs within the Romance and Germanic traditions. The scope, benefits, and risks of each strategy were clarified, depending on the type of text and target audience. Achieving intersystemic equivalence requires a combination of lexical, functional, and systemic correspondence of terms. Effective translation depends on a deep analysis of both legal systems and a balanced choice of translation strategy. The results can be used to create unified terminology bases and develop methodological guidelines for translating legal texts in a multilingual environment.