Problems of translating legal discourse with special reference to the United Nations' documents

This thesis is solely devoted to the study of the problems associated with English-Arabic-English legal translation. With this aim in mind, I will analyse authentic parallel texts of three legal subtypes, international, legislative, and official documents. Parallel texts refer to texts in two or more languages that have the same communicative purpose and render the same message (i.e. UN texts). The study adopts a contrastive model for analyzing and describing some linguistic features on semantic and syntactic levels. In fact, we see that it is not a comprehensive model of comparison since it covers areas of difficulty in translating legal language. The process of comparison falls into two stages, the first of which is descriptive and it identifies the areas of differences between the Arabic and English texts in relation to the elements mentioned earlier. The second stage critically analyses the parallel-translations and techniques used for translating them. At this stage, we will attempt to provide suggestions and solutions for the problematic areas whenever possible. The thesis follows the following sequence: an overview of legal discourse in chapter one; the interface between legal translation and general translation theory in chapter 2; the features of English and Arabic legal discourse in chapter 3; the problems of legal translation in chapter 4; the theoretical framework, method of analysis and the list of documents for data analysis in chapter 5; the data analysis in chapters 6 and 7, and finally the findings and conclusion. This study provides useful conclusions and recommendations to the reader. It reveals the unique nature of legal English in comparison with the hybrid nature of legal Arabic. There are a number of similarities and differences between English and Arabic legal discourse on the semantic, syntactic, and textual levels. The analysis of data shows the diversity of techniques used in rendering the areas of differences, such as the culture-bound and system-based elements, the modal auxiliaries, and the passive.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo