Concept System Construction: a Step toward better legal Communication.

ABSTRACT Lahousseine Id-youss: CONCEPT SYSTEM CONSTRUCTION: A STEP TOWARD BETTER LEGAL COMMUNICATION (Under the direction of Helge Daniëls, Hendrik Kockaert and Frieda Steurs) Translating private legal documents raises a great deal of terminological and conceptual problems due to the national character of legal terminology. Legal concepts emerge and evolve within national borders independently of their counterparts in other nations and jurisdictions. Exploring the nature of these issues and coming up with a proposal to resolve them seems to be of utmost importance. In this study, we suggest that the construction of bilingual or multilingual as well as bi-legal and multi-legal concept systems can be an adequate solution to some aspects of this legal translation situation. For that end, as a case study, we have explored the translations of marriage and divorce certificates from Arabic into French in the context of immigration from Morocco to Belgium within the framework of family reunification. To put our proposal into practice, we have created the concept systems underlying the marriage and divorce subject-fields and analyzed three certificates and their translations against them in order to (I) gain proper understanding of the kind of problems associated with the translation of these legal documents; (II) explain how this solution can help remedy some of those issues; and (III) account for the grounds on which the legal translator’s terminological choices are based. To ensure producing reliable results, we have carried out our conceptual analyses from both semasiological and onomasiological perspectives, on the one hand; and we have merged the benefits offered by the Classical model and by the Prototype Theory, on the other. Moreover, since the nature of the study requires conducting in-depth analyses, the qualitative approach has been the suitable framework through which we aimed to achieve our research objectives.

Publication year:2016

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