The translation of juxtaposed synonymous adjectives in legal English into Arabic

Abstract EN

Legal translators frequently come across two juxtaposed words with closely related meaning during the translation of legal texts.

Grammatically, these words can be nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

This paper aims at investigating this phenomenon and the problems that face legal translators while translating one type of these juxtapositions : juxtaposed synonymous adjectives in legal texts.

It also investigates the strategies adopted by translators to solve such problems and proposes alternative strategies if the existing one is inappropriate.

Theoretically, the paper sheds light on the phenomenon of juxtaposition and synonymy in general and the use of juxtaposed synonymy in legal English in particular.

Practically, to realize the aims of the paper, seven sentences containing juxtaposed synonymous adjectives have been chosen from different English legal texts and given to twenty-five translators.

The analyses of the data show that the subjects adopt one strategy in which they provide two words as equivalents to the juxtaposed synonymous adjectives.

Moreover, the study concludes that such rendering constitutes a redundancy in Arabic and is due to the ignorance of the historical reason, which is behind the use of such pairs of synonymous adjectives.

Therefore, the paper proposes an alternative strategy in which one translation is given as long as the intended meaning of both adjectives is the same.