¹Department of English /College of Languages/University of Baghdad ²Department of English /College of Education for Human Sciences / Ibn Rushd / University of Baghdad

*Corresponding Author E-mail: doc_altamimi@yahoo.com

Accepted 9th February, 2016

Translation is both a social and cultural phenomenon, it can neither exist outside a social community and it is within society, nor it can be viewed as a medium of cross-cultural fertilization. This paper aims to investigate the difficulties that a translator may face when dealing with legal texts such as marriage and divorce contracts. These difficulties can be classified according to the present paper into syntactic, semantic, and cultural. The syntactic difficulties include word order, syntactic arrangement, unusual sentence structure, the use of model verbs in English, and difference in legal system. As to the semantic difficulties, they involve lack of established terminology, finding functional and lexical equivalence, word for word translation, synonymous and antonymous words, wordiness and redundancy, loan words, neologism, and paraphrasing. Concerning the cultural difficulties , they relate to differences in traditions and norms , religion and social terminology as well as faiths and doctrines .This paper falls into two parts : part one is theoretical and tackles the definition and significance of legal translation , characteristics of legal texts , the techniques used in legal translation and types of legal texts; whereas part two is practical and deals with the general difficulties of legal texts with special reference to marriage and divorce contracts . It shows the syntactic, semantic and cultural analysis of different forms of marriage and divorce contracts that are translated from Arabic into English. It has been found that translating such legal documents as marriage and divorce contracts pose great difficulties that are due to the differences in legal systems of the two languages.

Keywords: legal translation, legal text, marriage and divorce contracts, syntactic semantic and cultural difficulties, equivalence

How To Cite This Article:

Dr. Ibtihal M. Al-Tameemi, Mahmood A. Farhan, Difficulties Encountered in Translating Some Legal Texts from Arabic Into English. Swift Journal of Social Science and Humanity 2(1), pp. 001-013.