Legal translation

Throughout the years, the traditional view of translation as a process of transcoding from one language into another has shifted to focusing more on the cultural aspects of a language. In view of that, according to Šarčević (2000, p. 55), “legal translation is no longer considered as a linguistic transcoding, but as an act of communication in the mechanism of law” and she suggests that “every national or municipal law creates an independent legal system with its own terminological apparatus and underlying conceptual structure, its own rules of classification, sources of law, methodological approaches” (p. 13). Gotti (2016) holds that legal translation is assessed based on its “adequacy to its communicative purpose in the target culture” and “legal documents in all languages address similar issues, [but] they do it in distinctive ways” because of “cultural differences of the societies in question and of their legal systems” (p. 147).