The BoLC for Legal Translations: A Trial Lesson

Abstract

This paper will explore how consulting the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini and Martelli 2007) can be helpful and advantageous when tackling legal translations. To this aim, a 4-hour trial lesson with experienced translators was organized. Before the workshop, the participants translated a 300-word legal document issued within a civil case. Their translations (from English to Italian) were revised during the trial lesson, where the attendants learned how to consult the BoLC. They also used supplementary online resources, such as dictionaries and/or experts' blogs or fora. The paper findings will remark that despite some drawbacks, such as the absence of POS tagging and lemmatization, and a quite complex search syntax, the BoLC helps dispel doubts and deliver outstanding translation work. Its main usefulness lies in the possibility to find formulaic expressions and collocational use, which can be rather intricate in legal discourse.

Translation of the Proper Nouns in Legal English

“…Firstly, as the information receiver, in order to have a clearly understanding of the real meaning that the author want to convey, translators should fully understand the original culture that was loaded by proper nouns. Then, translators should add necessary background information by annotation so that the target version can convey adequate information to the readers, which can ensure the success of the inter-lingual communication (Giampieri, 2019). For example, "Yesterday, he read 'the Social Contract'," Suppose the readers do not know "the Social Contract", then the writer can annotate it to introduce more about the book, such as "the Social Contract, a book was written by French scholar Jean Jacques Rousseau".…”