The Cultural Embeddedness of Legal Texts

Abstract

The functionalist approaches in translation science lay great stress on the principle of cultural embeddedness of the source and the target languages and accordingly view translation as an intercultural transfer. In legal communication based on legal texts, communicative situations are directly affected by the legal systems of the source and target cultures. The legal system of one of the parties involved or, more rarely, a supranational legal system, is generally adopted as the communication framework and thus defines the language to be used. The translatability of legal texts, however, directly depends on the relatedness of the legal systems underlying the translation. The communicating parties therefore need to be well acquainted with the legal system(s) involved. This is especially the case when using English as the language of communication, as the Anglo-American legal system, based essentially on common law, differs substantially from continental law, to which most of European countries belong. The nonequivalence of many legal concepts and terms pertaining to these two systems thus has to be taken into consideration. In this paper, cases of non-equivalence will be illustrated with examples from the terminology used to define different types of system-bound legal professions and court structures, as well as with specific terms referring to particular areas of law, such as company law. The Cultural Embeddedness of Legal Texts

Colliding Worlds: Issues Relating to Language Translation in Accounting and Some Lessons from Other Disciplines

“…Language is closely related to culture (Evans, ; Kocbek, ). The link between language, culture, and thought is expressed in the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that speakers of different languages think in different ways because ‘[t]he “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.…”

“…These include the culture of the target text reader and the function or purpose (‘skopos’) the translated text is to perform in this culture (Schäffner, ). Skopos theory stresses the ‘importance of a clearly defined purpose (i.e., skopos ) of a translation, the necessity for a precise and complete translation brief/commission, the assertion of the role of the translator as intercultural expert, and the application of the principle of cultural embeddedness of the source and target texts’ (Kocbek, , p. 50) . Although one function is generally dominant, a text may have different communicative functions; that is, it may inform, instruct or appeal (Adab, ).…”

“…As with law (see Cao, ; Kocbek, , b), the meaning of accounting terms depends on the respective accounting system rather than on any linguistic properties, and translatability of accounting terminology depends on how closely the accounting systems of source and target language are related. If they are not closely related, neither suitable terminology nor equivalent concepts exist.…”

“…have no direct equivalents in common law‐based systems. They are usually translated in a variety of ways, as lawyer, advocate, solicitor, etc.—none of which however are direct equivalents of the Roman law terms (Kocbek, ). For further examples of non‐equivalence between apparently similar concepts/terms see, for example, David and Brierley (), Šarčević (), and Cao ().…”

Auditors' Response to Different Reporting Environments: Experimental Evidence From the Quantity and Quality of Auditors' Evidence Demands in China

“…This process may run several rounds until all discrepancies are alleviated (Brislin, 1970). 9 We acknowledge that, due to linguistic and cultural barriers, it is difficult to achieve exact equivalence in translation from one language to another language (Kocbek, 2008). Despite this limitation of back translation, it is still widely used to alleviate discrepancies in translation.…”