Due to the growing demand for legal translation into different languages, it is especially important to pay attention to specific terminology which can cause certain problems while dealing with translation. In this article, I will refer to some linguistic aspects of translating English legal texts into Russian. Although some issues of legal translation have already been discussed by M. Baskakova, S. Vlasenko, M. Gamzatov and many other researchers in this field, it is still relevant to discuss them, because, along with language development, new translation problems arise.

The first problem which I would like to address is the inappropriate and random use of such linguistic methods as generalization and concretization. In fact, the language of law needs to be precise which means that terminology should be as monosemantic as possible. Those terms which do not have equivalents in Russian should be explained with the help of another technique known as a descriptive (explanatory) method in two or three words. All these techniques are quite helpful due to English “laconism” which often results in a descriptive translation into Russian.

Russian linguist O. Burukina (2010) mentioned another method called “constructive translation” used mostly for terminological word combinations absent in the target language or in the culture of the country into whose language the translation is being done. A translator needs to look for an appropriate equivalent for each part of the terminological expression and combine them into a terminological word combination (term) proper for a certain terminological system (Burukina, 2000). More.

See: TermCoord

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