Arabic-English-Arabic Legal Translation

Arabic-English-Arabic Legal Translation provides a groundbreaking investigation of the issues found in legal translation between Arabic and English. Drawing on a contrastive-comparative approach, it analyses parallel authentic legal documents in both Arabic and English to examine the features of legal discourse in both languages and uncover the different translation techniques used. In so doing, it addresses the following questions:

• What are the features of English and Arabic legal texts?
• What are the similarities and differences of English and Arabic legal texts?
• What are the difficult areas of legal translation between English and Arabic legal texts?
• What are the techniques for translating these difficult areas on the lexical and syntactic levels?

Features include:

• A thorough description of the features of legal translation in both English and Arabic, drawing on empirical new research, corpus data analysis and strategic two-way comparisons between source texts and target texts
• Coverage of a broad range of topics including an outline of the chosen framework for data analysis, a historical survey of legal discourse developments in both Arabic and English and detailed analyses of legal literature at both the lexical and syntactic levels
• Attention to common areas of difficulty such as Shariah Law terms, archaic terms and model auxiliaries
• Many examples and excerpts from a wide selection of authentic legal documents, reinforced by practical discussion points, exercises and practice drills to encourage active engagement with the material and opportunities for hands-on learning.

Wide-ranging, scholarly and thought-provoking, this will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates on Arabic, Translation Studies and Comparative Linguistics courses. It will also be essential reading for translation professionals and researchers working in the field.

Hanem El-Farahaty is Teaching Fellow in the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds, UK, and an Associate of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a Lecturer at the University of Mansoura, Egypt.