First of all, translation concerns entire texts or parts thereof, regardless of doubts or lack thereof. From the translator`s point of view, the interpretation of the law therefore appears “selective” [26: 263]. Of course, legal translators face many difficulties in their work [see: 22, 25, 40, 41], some of which can converge on the problems of interpretation identified in legal theory: ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. However, it is highly doubtful whether they have the legitimacy to eliminate them. Indeterminacy in legal texts is often intentional [see 15]. In this respect, the legal text is comparable to a literary text, in which indeterminacy is “not regarded as a defect, but as an inherent characteristic which should be preserved in translation” [25:181]. Therefore, translators should not run the risk of upsetting the delicate balance of a legal instrument by “trying to clarify vagueness, ambiguities and ambiguities” [46:8]. When a translator eliminates ambiguities by choosing one possible meaning over another, he puts himself in the place of the legislator (from the point of view of a judge) or in the position of the judge (from the point of view of a legislator); None of these roles is designed for its footnote 5: “With regard to ambiguities, it is generally accepted that the translator is not allowed to resolve an ambiguity in the source text, as this could be an act of interpretation” [45:92]. The same applies to indeterminacy. Obviously, a translator should not eliminate vagueness by using a more precise term, as this would change the normative content of the text [see: 34: 93-99].
William, Eskridge. 1990. Gadamer/Interpretation of the Act. Columbia Law Review 90(3): 609–681. This type of error represents the highest percentage (45.68%) of all error types. The large number of mistakes in this regard is actually far beyond our expectations. As we know, all research papers are written by law professors, but the abstract does not necessarily have to be translated by the authors. Some authors translated the summaries themselves, others asked their students to translate the summaries and some let the translation centres do the translation. Therefore, the translators of these summaries have different backgrounds. They can be law professors, law students, English majors or others. Liao, Hsueh-Chun.
2009. Comparative Study of the Texts Translated into Chinese of the General Agreement on Trade in Services between Taiwan and China. Unpublished master`s thesis from Fu-Jen.Search Catholic University in Google Scholar Such knowledge is assumed in some models of legal competence in translation [see: 41:13], and rightly so. The difficulty lies not in its degree of sophistication or complexity, but in the very practical nature of the knowledge. It is difficult to achieve this without participating in the legal discourse. In other words, it requires an inner perspective, which is naturally adopted by a practicing lawyer or judge. A translator`s point of view, on the other hand, is external by default. In Hart`s words, an external point of view refers to a person who is an observer “whose interest in law is primarily theoretical, who simply wants to describe how members of a group see and respond to a set of rules, and who may also want to make predictions” [48:1159-1160].
This explanation corresponds to the claims of translation theory, where the difference between legal interpretation and legal translation is rendered as the difference between two epistemic views [26:264] and the translator as “an outsider who is not involved in the official and binding process of interpretation … a stranger to the discursive community” [16: 386]. All these statements, however contradictory, are too vague to be easily rejected and too general to have any practical value. In our view, much of the inconsistency of divergent views on the relationship between legal translation and legal interpretation is due to the vagueness of the meaning of the term. Bajčić correctly argued that “interpretation in law is not necessarily the same as interpretation in translation studies [2:109]. In fact, so far, the topic has been discussed mainly by translators who, although they have sufficient legal training or experience in legal writing, are not necessarily familiar with the theoretical and practical intricacies of legal interpretation. This can and will sometimes lead to the use of inaccurate or confusing terms, poor or outdated classifications, etc. This should come as no surprise, as specialists in all relevant disciplines, including translators, terminologists, linguists and comparative lawyers, “tend to view legal translation through a methodological lens and in accordance with the dominant interests in their disciplines” [6:2]. Our aim is therefore to offer a legal theoretical perspective on the relationship between legal translation and legal interpretation. Jakobson, novel.
2012 (1959). On the linguistic aspects of translation. In: Theories of Translation, edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 144–151. doi.org/10.7208/9780226184821-015 Some examples of syntactic errors are shown in Table 4. As we can see, some of the lexical examples are repeated here. In this case, we focus on the syntactic aspect such as the correct word order of the expression. For example, the correct expression “第 53 條第1項 `di 53 tiao di1 xiang` (Ex 2 in Table 4)” is the first paragraph of Article 53 and not the first section, Article 53. That is, even if the expression is translated by the correct lexicons, we must always remove the comma and insert the preposition of to make the legal term correct. Examples 3 and 7 are similar errors.
The fact that similar errors as such claim 102 such articles explains why many translators do not have the legal or linguistic knowledge in this regard. In Chinese, a certain point of a rule is expressed from top to bottom, such as 證券交易法第 20 條第1項 `zhengquan jiaoyi fa di 20 tiao di 1 xiang` (literal translation: Securities and Exchange Act, Article 20, paragraph 1); In English, however, a particular point of a rule is expressed in a bottom-up manner, such as Section 1 of Section 20 of the Securities and Exchange Act. It is essential that translators are familiar with this legal style, as such expressions are ubiquitous in legal language. Shapiro, Scott. 2006. What is the Internal View?, Fordham Law Review 75, 1157-1170. Available at: ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol75/iss3/2. Please note, however, that not all possible linguistic inaccuracies constitute legal doubts of interpretation. Most problems are solved by a textual or extra-textual context, as in everyday life. For example, no one will notice the syntactic ambiguity of the phrase “flying planes can be dangerous” when we say it in response to the news of a plane crash.
Similarly, a judge will not be bothered by the vagueness of the phrase “a significant quantity of a psychotropic drug” if 4,000 kg of amphetamine were smuggled. These observations lead us to the next question about how problems of interpretation arise. Before doing the research, since there are many problems that contribute to the difficulties and problems of legal translation, let`s give a brief introduction to each of them.