Terminology for translatorsa termbase in the domain of company law

Abstract

In a world where people, goods, products, services, companies, and capital move globally, specialised communication and translation play a crucial role. Legal translation is acknowledged as a complex and time-consuming task, mainly because it implies a transfer from one language to another, as well as from one legal system to another legal system. As legal concepts are culture-bound and not easily transferable, finding suitable equivalents is a source of constant problems for translators. Since existing terminological resources do not provide translators with enough information to make decisions without extensive searches and concept comparison, the main objective of this project is to create a systematic and descriptive bilingual terminology database in British English and European Portuguese in the domain of company law (company incorporation). The purpose is to understand needs in legal translation and find out what kind of information legal translators require to make informed terminology decisions, as well as to understand and decide on the most suitable strategies for finding equivalents in legal translation. The methodology is corpus-driven, rather than concept-driven. We resort to comparable corpora, semi-automatic term extraction tools and concordance tools, as well as terminology management software. The result of this project is a complete termbase with 42 terms with all the information legal translators require: simple and clear definitions, contexts, phraseology, and usage notes, collected from reliable sources. As for the best strategy to translate legal terminology, we conclude that a pragmatic approach is needed, and legal terminology should be translated using the terminology of the target legal system. We conclude that terminology management is crucial for a specialised domain of knowledge like legal translation.