An-Najah Staff

• This study falls into two parts. The first part aims at demonstrating how pragmatic and functional considerations are important in legal translation. The corpus the researchers relied on consisted of nine translated versions of three authentic contracts. A Real-Estate Contract, a Contract of Lease and an Employment Contract were commissioned to be translated by three professional translators certified by the Palestinian Ministry of Justice asking them to translate these texts the way they would usually deal with legally binding, official documents.

• The second part explores the relevance of Vermeer's Skopos theory to the translation of contracts through a small pilot study that compares the work of translation students with a broad, theoretical background and a professional translator uninformed about theories of translation. A group of graduate students of translation and applied linguistics and a professional translator were assigned to translate a "Power of Attorney" legal text from English into Arabic. They were all asked to translate the same text into a different context where it would be performing a new function. 

• This study demonstrates how standardized legal language features can still be tamed to serve the ultimate goal of successfully communicating the message across languages as intended and as commissioned. Unlike previous studies that were devoted to systemizing and mathematizing legal translation, this study focuses on communicative and functional approaches to contractual translation between English and Arabic

Globalization seems to have imposed a new paradigm on us whether we approve of it or not we ought to adapt and adjust to the matrix we live in and this involves complying with what appears to be practical and feasible.    This appears to be consistent with what Thomas Kuhn (1996) conceives of the conditions and circumstances which induce ‘paradigm change’ in the theories and mechanisms we use in some of the social sciences or humanities which we subscribe to in order to account for a particular transaction be that translation or a communication encounter between two individuals. To be precisely candid, what takes place in the process of translation along with the heightened debate among translation scholars concerning the question of ‘equivalence’ has ushered in such a state of affairs which calls for a real solution or a paradigm change in our overall approach to translation equivalence.   This particular approach has taken into account the applicability of the mechanisms with which one can account as intelligibly as possible for both the fragility of the notion of translation ‘equivalence’, and the possibility of considering the act of translation as an act of inter-cultural communication encounter. Therefore, this paper is designed to underlie the existence of a paradigm shift in the process of translation equivalence and underscore the countless merits of adopting the proposition which subscribes for ‘skopos theory’ or a functionalist approach as a viable solution to so many problems confronting every translator as well as communicators.    My rationale for such a claim comes from various but highly salient reasons one of which is that the existing translation approaches on ‘translation equivalence’ do not seem to provide inclusive remedies to what confront the translator in translating technology terms, nor do some of these approaches acknowledge the significance of the elevation of the role of the translator to an author status; and the merit of prioritizing the target text over the source text on a more practical and rational basis.Keywords:Translation, functional equivalence, technology terms, paradigm change

This study falls into two parts. The first part aims at demonstrating how pragmatic and functional considerations are important in legal translation. The corpus the researchers relied on consisted of nine translated versions of three authentic contracts. A Real-Estate Contract, a Contract of Lease and an Employment Contract were commissioned to be translated by three professional translators certified by the Palestinian Ministry of Justice asking them to translate these texts the way they would usually deal with legally binding, official documents. The second part explores the relevance of Vermeer\'s Skopos theory to the translation of contracts through a small pilot study that compares the work of translation students with a broad, theoretical background and that of a professional translator uninformed about theories of translation. A group of graduate students of translation and applied linguistics and a professional translator were assigned to translate a \"Power of Attorney\" legal text from English into Arabic. They were all asked to translate the same text into a different context where it would be performing a new function. This study demonstrates how standardized legal language features can still be tamed to serve the ultimate goal of successfully communicating the message across languages as intended and as commissioned. Unlike previous studies that were devoted to systemizing and mathematizing legal translation, this study focuses on communicative and functional approaches to contractual translation between English and Arabic.