Contrastive Analysis of Arabic-English Translation of Legal Texts

Authors

  • Omar Osman Jabak University of Nizwa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1302.09

Keywords:

Arabic-English translation, faithful translation, legal texts, legal translation

Abstract

The present study aims to provide a contrastive analysis of Arabic-English translation of ten legal texts with an eye to evaluating the accuracy of the translation.  The researcher collected the data from El-Farahaty’s (2015) Arabic–English–Arabic Legal Translation. A contrastive analysis was developed to assess the accuracy of the translation of the legal texts selected. The examination of the source legal texts and the translations provided either by the authoress of the book herself or the sources from which she collected them revealed serious errors such as overtranslation, omission of translating important words in the source texts, wrong choice of equivalents in the target language, gloss translation, punctuation mistakes in the target texts and grammatical mistakes in the target texts. Further research on the assessment of Arabic-English translation of legal texts is required to encourage professional legal translators and scholars to approach legal translation more professionally and responsibly.

Author Biography

Omar Osman Jabak, University of Nizwa

Department of Foreign Languages, College of Arts and Sciences

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Published

2022-03-01

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