Bridging legal cultures

The translation of legal culture-specific words in Crown Court criminal judgements

Abstract

The article focuses on the analysis of legal culture-specific words found in Crown Court criminal judgements as well as how the translation of such linguistic units may influence the outcome of a criminal trial. The main objective of the research is to demonstrate that the main linguistic problem posed by legal translations, particularly in criminal-related texts is the translation of legal culture-specific words, one of the few linguistic units in this field of which translations can fairly be considered subjective. In order to undergo the research, we have employed three main methods pertaining to qualitative research, amongst which an in-depth discourse analysis of a limited series of the most recent criminal judgements in English emitted by the Crown Court as far as the translation of legal culture-specific words in concerned and its indomitable impact on the decision-making process, but also content analysis and case study. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether automated translation is an adequate, acceptable and accurate choice in the legal translation of criminal law corpora, what are the main errors encountered and what advantages and the positive characteristics of this kind of translation in comparison with human translation. We shall also discuss the importance of acquiring comparative law knowledge in order to achieve adequate and accurate translation and argue according to this view, the role of the translator in the 21st century beyond post-editing. In order to achieve this objective, we set out a corpus-based investigation that analyses various renditions and translations of criminal judgements that focus on legal culture-bound words.