Translating Legal Treaties: Adequacy or Acceptability Implications for Teaching Legal Translation

Translation is almost always conducted within a certain socio-cultural framework with its particular ideology; translators operate primarily in the interest of the culture and society into which they are translating. In the present study the researchers examined the application of various shift types in two legal translations to probe the degree to which socio-cultural and ideological inclinations of the translator may affect the translation, its adequacy and acceptability. Two legal treaties in English (the Geneva contract and NPT) and their Persian translations released by IRI’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs were used as the source and target texts. The analysis of the translations indicated the lack of ideological and cultural shifts and the presence of structural and stylistic shifts. Legal texts are highly sensitive and need utmost precision in their translation. These requirements make other shift types out of the question in legal translation. The results therefore suggest that, in teaching legal translation, attention should be devoted to structural and stylistic shifts. As for the adequacy and acceptability, translated text cannot be totally adequate or totally acceptable, the poles of adequacy and acceptability are on a continuum, and translators move between these two extremes

Keywords:

Shift , Adequacy , Acceptability , Legal Translation Teaching