| المستخلص: |
Compared to other Languages for Specific Purposes (LSPs), the terminology of the legal domain poses a number of specific challenges to translation. Firstly, most legal terms refer to abstract concepts and are not defined through referential properties (contrary to e.g. machine parts in a technical domain), but rather intentionally, using other abstract concepts. Secondly, because the law deals with all aspects of everyday life, legal terminology shows a considerable overlap with Language for General Purposes (LGP). Thirdly, thelegal jargon often uses a number near-synonyms (e.g. violation, breach, infringement or null and void) for the same concept (Gozdz-Roszkowski 2013). These properties, potentially cause semantic vagueness and necessitate that an onomasiological approach to legal terminology (first defining a concept and then listing the terms) be supplemented with a semasiological approach that investigates how near-synonymous terms and terms shared with LGP realize their flexible meaning potential in specific contexts. In a translation setting, this problem of semantic instability is further aggravated because the terms’ contextual nuances do not only have to be adequately rendered in other language but the terms’ translational equivalents also have their own ambiguity in a different legal system, whose concepts might be similar but often not completely equivalent. In this paper, we look at a case study of the translation of the Statutory Regulations of the University of Leuven(OrganiekReglement KU Leuven) from Dutch and the Belgian-Flemish legal system into English with different legal systems present in the background (UK Law, American Law, European Law). First we select a sample of terms in the source text that have multiple translation in the target text. We then analyse whether these term show ambiguity in the source text through a corpus-based analysis. Finally, we analyse if and how this ambiguityled to multiple translations in the English target.
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