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This article deals with the difficulty of translating institution names. The translation of institution names from one language into another plays an important role at the translation of official documents. Institution names are stronger conventionalised than other proper names, because the judicial system is determined by the appropriate public institutions. The names of institutions arose in each speech community related to the judicial tradition and the legal history, which must be taken into account at translating them from one language into another and thus from one legal system into another. This article points out the difficulties that arise at different levels when translating institution names, it presents the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions offered so far in the specialized literature and proposes a surrogate solution.
The present paper is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the various relationships between language and law. It is impossible to deal with all these relationships in the present study. Therefore the relationship between language and law will be dealt with in this paper as far as it points out the relationships between linguistics and jurisprudence. Considering the diverse relationships between the fields of linguistics and jurisprudence, the interdisciplinary collaboration between these two disciplines could be improved by establishing a branch of study dealing with legal linguistics.
Kultur und (Rechts)Sprache
(2010)
The content of the present paper can be outlined as follows:
1) Law is an integrative part of culture.
2) Legal terminology is system-bound. Thus, within one and the same language there are as many legal languages as there are legal orders that use that particular language as their legal language.
3) The representation of culture in legal texts is encountered both on word and on text level: on the one hand legal terms have often been referred to as culturemes, as they are informed by the respective legal order; on the other hand texts are being regarded as cultural products as they depend on the particular legal order.
Starting from the generally acknowledged fact that exact translation is not possible, this article presents the difficulties of translation between legal systems in general, which appear on different levels and are of such extent, that it has often been spoken about the untranslatability of law. The idea of untranslatability is a controversed one in the specialized literature, as some authors show that it is no case of absolute untranslatability, but one of relative untranslatability, since the translator – who has to bridge the gap between the source and the target legal system – must find a surrogate solution for the missing legal term.