Übersetzungstheorien und Gebrauchstexte

The central research question for this paper is how and to what extent translation theories affect the translation of legal texts. I will use the functional-pragmatic approach as one particular modern translation theory and investigate translation solutions in the field of lexical and syntactic problems on the basis of a small corpus of legal texts from the National translator’s exam. As a means of control I compare these solutions with suggested solutions of a small number of candidates preparing themselves for the exam and of some translation experts.

My findings show that the old dichotomy free vs. literal is not applicable to this type of translations as we find ourselves on a continuum. The translation brief and the legal force of a particular text influence strongly the translation strategy. Whenever the legal force of the source text supersedes the target text, the strategy of the translator should be at the ‘documentary’ (Nord 1989) end of the continuum. My findings need however to be corroborated on the basis of a much bigger corpus which for the time being is established at the Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication at the Norwegian School of Economics and Administration (NHH) including other language pairs than the one from which I have drawn my examples.