Teaching translation in legalese

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the main translation mistakes that Romanian students in Law make when faced with original texts in legalese. Taking into account all the features that characterize legal English in comparison to plain English (apud Tiersma 2008), i.e. specific vocabulary, verbosity, lengthy convoluted structures, complex syntax, conjoined phrases, redundancy and repetition, negation, impersonal constructions, vagueness, ritualization, etc, the subject of our analysis bears on how these difficulties are usually tackled in specialized translation seminars. The paper also proposes various repair work strategies materialized in different types of exercises specifically aimed at the study of legalese.