ASPECTS SÉMANTIQUES ET PRAGMATIQUES DE LA TRADUCTION JURIDIQUE COMMERCIALE
SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF THE COMMERCIAL LEGAL TRANSLATION

Summary/Abstract: The article provides a pragmatic and semantic overview of the main difficulties of commercial legal translation, attributable mainly to the nature of legal discourse. Commercial Law is one of the most important branches of Private Law and largely used in the present-day Romanian business environment. Romanian and French Law are both derived from Roman Law and have followed a similar path over the centuries. However, differences in concepts and institutions are not incidental and dealing with them often requires some knowledge of both legal systems. Commercial legal translation is governed by specific rules. A translator must be aware of the fact that law is a social science whose evolution is in permanent correlation with that of society and often surpassed by the latter. In this sense, an ideal translator would be a person with an in-depth knowledge of both the language and the legal field concerned. From a pragmatic standpoint, a translation firstly depends on the nature of the text and its finality. Moreover, such extra-contextual elements as the time, place and conditions of the translating process, and the translator’s personality are likely to influence the quality of a translation and reveal who and what «hides» beyond. From a semantic viewpoint, difficulties are more easily identifiable. False friends, archaisms, neologisms, words with several meanings, specialized or common words used with a legal meaning are some of the most important characteristics of legal discourse, which make legal translation both intriguing and fascinating.

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