Interpretasie en vertaling van 'n regsteks

M.A. (Applied Linguistics)The rigid nature of legal language seems to be a major factor contributing to the inaccessibility or unintelligibility of legal texts. This is often also true of the translated texts. As the law plays such an important role in the community at large, influencing and ruling the lives of its members in many ways, it should be accessible to all. The point of departure of this study is therefore the problems surrounding the apparent poor communicative ability of legal texts as well as translated legal texts, not only from the point of view of the uninitiated, but also the initiated, those who are legally literate. In this context, linguistic and extralinguistic characteristics of legal texts, theoretical as well as pragmatic, are identified to illustrate the differences between legal and other technical texts. The development of South African law is discussed in broad terms to illustrate where the various legal categories influencing the nature of legal texts differ or agree. From this it is clear that the South African legal system, while strongly influenced by Roman-Dutch as well as English law, developed indigenously and is therefore unique .. A study of the analysis and interpretation of a legal translation can therefore not, merely with minor adjustment, be compared with studies of legal translation in other countries, because of the vast differences between legal systems