Investigating the Translatability of Legal Texts: Designing Effective Transfer Strategies for Legal Translations

Numerous scholars (Nord, 1991; Šarčević, 1997; Decaudin and Popineau, 2019) state that legal texts are translated for a purpose or for legal specific needs depending on the context, personal or professional. Under these circumstances, the translator should possess the ability of understanding the legal context of the source text in order to identify the problems and the strategies for the translation. In other words, the translator should find the answers to the questions why, for whom and for what purpose the legal source text is translated to be able to determine the level of translatability of the legal text.

This paper is focused on the achievement of optimal translatability of legal texts which depends on specific components of the legal translation process. Legal translation requires general and specialized knowledge and competences, involves the correct identification and appropriation of traditions, methods and language aspects, and supposes the development of an interdisciplinary approach. We propose to demonstrate the possibility and the need of achieving optimal translatability of legal texts through two models of analysis, a theoretical and a practical model, both based on the specificity of legal translation as a context-dependent activity.