Legal Terminology: Challenges of English-Ukrainian Translation

Abstract

Background: Ukraine’s decision to choose a pro-western trajectory of development has brought about new challenges, among which are problems in the approximation of a national legal system with EU law. To overcome these challenges, we must develop a well-grounded scientific approach to dealing with the translation of legal terminology, paying special attention to the classification of legal terminology and the difficulties that translators often face. The results of the present study indicate that English-language legal discourse needs further research and development. The process of translating a legal text presents a number of challenges related to the peculiarities of legal language, the linguistic and cultural disparities between the source language and the target language, the divergent legal systems, and different linguistic traditions. A special role is played by difficulties brought on by the legal nature of terms and differences in national legal systems. Methods: In this article, the authors use a comparative-analytical method, together with continuous sampling of the databases and dictionaries of English-Ukrainian legal terminology via a qualitative method. Results and Conclusions: Lexical-semantic transformations and methods are proposed to address linguistic challenges. These are techniques such as transcoded borrowing, calquing, analogue replacement, descriptive and explanatory translation, modulation, concretisation, generalisation, addition, and omission. These methods help to preserve the meaning of terminological units with a possible replacement of their structure. From our perspective, the most expedient solutions for translating linguistically challenging terms are calquing, descriptive translation, and addition. These methods preserve the semantic meaning of the original term and reproduce it as clearly as possible in the target language. The article emphasises the necessity for further advancement in a specific direction on the subject of English-language legal discourse and the exploration of novel approaches to the problem of translating English-language legal terminology.