On the Instruction of Legal Translation with Innovative Techniques: Unveiling Semantic Relations

Abstract

Overall, the search for translation equivalents is a highly difficult, time-consuming task within intercultural legal communication. It is directly linked to legal systems, with their own lexicon and meaning. In this paper, we try to display and argue how legal translators may also resort to a specific semantic relation, such as hypernymy, as an innovation to find a wider lexical equivalent. To reach our aim, we will select a list of 18 (British and North American) legal terms featured by their Spanish translation difficulty -parting from our UAM University legal translation trainees’ renderings (within an Innovative Teaching Project)- and by their allocation to court judgements. These terms will be searched (and contrasted) by using a two-headed methodology, checking both print and online dictionaries, and we will then provide one (or more) hypernym for each of them. The main findings of our study unveil how helpful hypernyms are in providing innovative translation alternatives beyond traditional translation techniques.