Browsing by Author "Isaacs, Isma-eel"

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    Problems and strategies in translating legal texts from arabic to english
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Isaacs, Isma-eel; Mohammed, Tawffeek Abdou Saeed
    This proposed study aims to explore the intricate problems and strategies involved in the translation of legal texts, particularly those related to Islamic Law, hereinafter referred to as ‘Shariah’, from Arabic to English. The study investigates the unique challenges posed by the legal language, explores various strategies employed to overcome these obstacles, and amplify the importance of achieving equivalence between the source and target languages. The research will tackle linguistic, cultural, and technical aspects of legal translation, addressing issues such as over-translation, gloss translation, punctuation and grammatical mistakes, structure shifts, and the translation of specific legal documents/genres such as: Shariah Compliant Wills, Applications, Certificates, Declarations, Islamic Court Documents, Civil Judicial Documents, Contracts, and Notarial Documents. The study utilises a mixed-methods approach. That is, it utilises parallel corpora for legal genres. The parallel corpus is not only used for a qualitative translation quality assessment of the problems and strategies involved in the translation of legal texts but it can also be used in providing some quantitative data such as the frequency of particular problems and/or strategies. For a more systematic qualitative analysis, the corpus will also be imported to Excel for coding purposes, data organization, and visual representation. The ultimate goal is to enhance the quality and accuracy of legal translation while preserving the essence and legal effect of the original documents. The theoretical and conceptual framework of the study stems from main linguistic and translation theories including equivalence theory, translation strategies, as discussed by prominent theoreticians including (Nida, 1972, Baker, 1992, Newmark, 1988, Hatim, 2001) and text linguistics and textuality standards (Beugrande and Dressler, 1981).