Dealing with syntactic discontinuities in the translation of legal texts [articol]

Abstract

An important structural feature of the legal discourse is represented by the presence of the qualifications, which are inserted within the structure of the legislative sentence at exactly those points where their meaning is most clearly and most appropriately rendered. This principle is meant to avoid ambiguity, but it often leads to syntactic discontinuities. How do the Romanian translators of European Union legal texts treat such discontinuities? The paper identifies some translation techniques for dealing with this phenomenon as they are reflected by the official Romanian variants of a set of European Union documents originally written in English.