Testing the Precision of Legal Translation: The Case of Translating Islamic Legal Terms into English

Alwazna, Rafat Y.

doi:10.1007/s11196-013-9331-z

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Moreover, literalism, i.e. faithfulness to the ST is unequivocally recommended in legal translation to preserve the letter of the law (Šarčević, 1997;Wolff, 2011;Alwazna, 2016a). Based on the foregoing, it seems evident that the translations produced by both C4 and C5 of the article concerned are acceptable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the contrary, the latter means that all the errors made by MT output should be recti ed, while such process should, of course, take a longer time when compared to the former (O'Brien, 2022). Full post-editing will be carried out in the present paper as the text that will be post-edited is legal which demands accuracy and precision (Alwazna, 2013a). e International Standards Organisation (ISO) has established a standard for post-editing, which is called "ISO 18857:2017. "…”

Section: Post-editingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The use of automation in the rendition of certain articles of the Saudi Commercial Law into English: a post-editing-based comparison of five machine translation systems

Alwazna

2024

Front. Artif. Intell.

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Efforts to automate translation were made in the 1950s and 1960s, albeit with limited resources compared to current advanced standards. Machine translation is categorised under computational linguistics that examines employing computer software in the rendition of text from one language into another. The present paper seeks to compare five different machine translation systems for the sake of assessing the quality of their outputs in rendering certain articles of the Saudi Commercial Law into English through post-editing based on Human Translation Edit Rate. Each machine translation output is assessed against the same post-edited version, and the closest output to the post-edited version with regard to the use of the same lexicon and word order will achieve the lowest score. The lower the score of the machine translation output is, the higher quality it has. The paper then analyses the results of the Human Translation Edit Rate metric evaluation to ascertain as to whether or not high-quality machine translation outputs always produce acceptable Arabic–English legal translation. The present paper argues that the use of Human Translation Edit Rate metric is a useful tool for the sake of undertaking post-editing procedures as it is a combination of both human evaluation as well as automatic evaluation. It is also advantageous as it takes account of both the use of lexicon and word order. However, such metric cannot be sufficiently depended on as one term substitution, which will be counted according to this metric as a single error, may render the whole sentence invalid, particularly in legal translation. This paper offers a baseline for the quality assessment of machine translation output through post-editing based on Human Translation Edit Rate metric and how its results should be analysed within Arabic–English legal translation context, which may have implications for similar machine translation output quality assessment contexts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Post-editingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The use of automation in the rendition of certain articles of the Saudi Commercial Law into English: a post-editing-based comparison of five machine translation systems

Alwazna

2024

Front. Artif. Intell.

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“…Field-specific translation, including that of the banking system texts, has its own status in various respects (Cao, 2007). The translator should be completely aware of the exact purpose and meaning of the source text as it is a kind of translation of the language used for a specific purpose (Alwazna, 2013). There are people who use online translation machines (e.g.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is why an advanced level of expertise is required in field-specific translations. As such, a person who does not have the necessary expertise of the materials under translation may ignore the main concept when translating technical terms (Goyal, 2013;Alwazna, 2013;Lefevere, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

English to Persian Translation Accuracy of “Rules and Regulations” of In-Ternational Banking System

Fathi-Alishah

Sajjadi

Kooroghli

et al. 2019

KSS

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This study comparatively analyzed the English to Persian translations of “rules and regulations” of the international banking system, at lexicon, phrase, sentence and paragraph levels to find out if the translations had been semantically comparable to their English versions. The translated texts, together with their English scource texts, were handed in to raters to assess and score semantically based on a three-point scale of “incorrect”, “fair” and “correct”. According to the results, the majority (96%) of lexicons had been translated correctly into Persian, while a small percentage of translated lexicons (3%) had a fair quality and an even smaller percentage (1%) were incorrectly translated. As for the phrases, most of them (86%) had been translated correctly into Persian, while a small percentage of translated phrases (8%) had a fair quality and an even smaller percentage (6%) had been incorrectly translated. Regarding sentences, 44% of their translations had a good and 44% had fair quality, whereas some smaller numbers (12%) had been incorrectly translated. Compared to previous components, i.e. lexicon and phrases, the percentage of incorrect translations had noticeably increased at the level of sentence. Yet, the mean words in Persian sentences (i.e., 23.48) were rather similar to the source language sentences (i.e., 25.72). Regarding paragraphs, the majority (40%) of the translations had either a good or fair quality, while a significant number (20%) had been incorrectly translated. So, unlike the lexicons and phrases, a significant number of sentences and paragraphs had semantically been inaccurately translated. In addition, the mean number of words in Persian paragraphs (64.6) was considerably smaller than the mean words in English paragraphs (71.1).

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“…901-902] gives examples of Islamic Jurisprudence terms, mainly (bay c al-wafa' wa al-amanah / ‫ﺑ‬ ‫ﻴ‬ ‫ﻊ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﻮ‬ ‫ﻓ‬ ‫ﺎ‬ ‫ﺀ‬ ‫ﻭ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻷ‬ ‫ﻣ‬ ‫ﺎ‬ ‫ﻧ‬ ‫ﺔ‬ -sale of faithfulness and honesty). In fact, Alwazna combined borrowing and paraphrase in the translation of such terms into English (for more examples on Islamic legal terms, refer to [6] and [7]). Descriptive paraphrase 'relays the intended legal meaning of the Islamic legal term and reproduces the intended legal effect thereof in the TT, which is the end result required in legal translation' [7, p. 903].…”

Section: Culture-specific and System-based Termsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Translating Lexical Legal Terms Between English and Arabic

El-Farahaty

2016

Int J Semiot Law

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Legal translation between English and Arabic is under researched. However, the growing need for it, due to immigration and asylum seeking, among other reasons, necessitates the importance of more research. The asymmetry between English and Arabic poses many difficulties for legal translators, be they linguistic-based, culture-specific or system-based. The aim of this research is to discuss ways of translating lexical items between English and Arabic. In this current discussion I will present, exemplify and analyse the common difficult areas of translating English/Arabic legal texts and suggest ways of dealing with them. These areas involve culture-specific and system-based terms, archaic terms, specialised terms and doublets and triplets. With this aim in mind, the paper answers the following research questions:1. What are the common difficulties of translating legal texts between English and Arabic? 2. What are the common lexical difficulties between English and Arabic legal texts? 3. What are the procedures of translating lexical legal terms between English and Arabic?The paper concludes that translating the above-mentioned lexical terms requires expertise, professional training, robust knowledge of the linguistic and legal systems of languages, as well as up-to-date electronic dictionaries and well-defined parallel corpora.

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Testing the Precision of Legal Translation: The Case of Translating Islamic Legal Terms into English

Cited by 9 publications

References 6 publications

The use of automation in the rendition of certain articles of the Saudi Commercial Law into English: a post-editing-based comparison of five machine translation systems

The use of automation in the rendition of certain articles of the Saudi Commercial Law into English: a post-editing-based comparison of five machine translation systems

English to Persian Translation Accuracy of “Rules and Regulations” of In-Ternational Banking System

Translating Lexical Legal Terms Between English and Arabic

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