On some specific aspects of teaching versatile translation at higher educational establishments

Like other areas of translation, the translation of legal texts is (or ought to be) a receiver oriented. Vested with the force of law, authenticated translations enable the mechanism of the law to function in more than one language. Translations of legislation, treaties and conventions, judicial decisions, and contracts are authoritative only if they have been approved and/or adopted in the manner prescribed by law.

The changed circumstances of the communication process and the special nature of international treaties and conventions place additional constraints on translators of international instruments, requiring them to exercise an extreme caution in their decisionmaking process. As shown by the disputed clause in UN Security

Council Resolution 242, an apparently harmless linguistic diversity can later lead to major differences in interpretation. The fact that the definite article was used in the French and Spanish texts (des territoires, de los territorios), as opposed to no article in the English and Ukrainian texts (from territories, z territorii), later raised the question as to whether the intention of the negotiators was to oblige Israel to withdraw its forces from all or just some of the occupied territories. The demand for flawless decision-making automatically places an additional pressure on translators, forcing them to carefully weigh each and every word, giving a special consideration to all possible interpretations and misinterpretations when formulating/shaping the text. Thus, the priority in such translations is to achieve the greatest possible interlingual concordance so as to prevent any ambiguity that could result in international disputes, unnecessary litigation or legal uncertainty.

Whenever a comparison of the authentic texts discloses a difference of meaning that cannot be removed by ordinary rules of interpretation, Article 33(4) of the Convention on the Law of Treaties instructs judges to ascertain "the meaning which best reconciles the texts, having regard to the object and purpose of the treaty." Since the Convention does not specify which methods should be used to reconcile the texts, it is left to the courts to determine how the parallel texts of treaties and conventions can best be reconciled in each case. The high degree of judicial discretion in resolving disputes arising from treaties and conventions puts a greater pressure on translators to express the uniform intent of the single instrument in language that is clear, precise, and, if possible, neutral. This is particularly important in situations where there is no judicial control and national courts from jurisdictions throughout the world are involved in the interpretation process. The failure to follow this advice has often resulted in conflicting decisions by national courts, sometimes defeating the very objective of the convention. This occurred in the case of the Warsaw Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules relating to International Carriage by Air, where the use of common law and civil law terms in a key provision in Article 25(1) ultimately led to the failure of the Convention. In the disputed article, which determined whether the carrier's liability could be limited or excluded, the term dol in the French original is translated by willful misconduct in the English text. This unfortunate translation was approved despite warning by the English delegate that willful misconduct would include acts performed with intention, as well as acts performed carelessly without regard for the consequences. Instead of searching for a common meaning or agreeing on the intended meaning, judges of continental courts tended to rule in favor of limited liability in similar cases where American courts declared the carrier to have unlimited liability. Such conflicting decisions occurred particularly in cases involving deaths and bodily injuries resulting from acts not caused with intention. Since this key provision served as an exclusion clause enabling plaintiffs/claimants to evade the thresholds of limited liability provided by the Convention, the conflicting decisions not only frustrated the object of the treaty but also directly encouraged plaintiffs/claimants to evade the treaty and shop for a more favorable forum, thus resulting in the failure of the Convention.

The incongruity of the disputed terms was later corrected in the Hague Protocol of 1955 amending the Convention by discarding both terms and incorporating a definition of dol into both texts.

Handling a legal text in any of its forms either a contract or agreement or a court ruling, it is at a glance one may catch that such a text contains a variety of terms and terminological expressions set restrictively in a designated sequence.

For example:

(UA) Відповідно до статті 13 Міжнародного пакту про економічні, соціальні і культурні права, Конституція визнає право на освіту за кожною людиною, незалежно від її статі, раси, національності, соціального і майнового стану, роду та характеру занять, світоглядних переконань, належності до партій, ставлення до релігії, стану здоров'я та інших обставин.

The Ukrainian legal terms and/or legal set expressions of obligation are construed by means of typical affixes and/or word order. Let's follow some of them from above: право людини на освіту "a right to education", where the Ukrainian attribute людини in the post-position is restrictively set and cannot transfer to the preposition even if transformed into an adjective людський ("human").

Here is another example in the form of an article wording clipped from the Constitution of Ukraine, Article 53:

(UA) Держава забезпечує доступність і безоплатність дошкільної, повної загальної середньої, професійно-технічної, вищої освіти в державних і комунальних навчальних закладах; розвиток дошкільної, повної загальної середньої, позашкільної, професійно-технічної, вищої і післядипломної освіти, різних форм навчання; надання державних стипендій та пільг учням і студентам.

The Ukrainian legal terms such as післядипломна освіта "postgraduate education" and дошкільна освіта "preschool education" are both construed by means of affixation, or pre-fixation, to be more accurate.

References

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3. Chaika, O. (2018). Language For Specific Purposes: Ukrainian Legal Terms Of Obligation [Vostochnoslavjanskie jazyki i literatury v evropejskom kontekste]. Mogilev, 85-90 [in Russian].

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8. Rosenne, S. (1983). The Meaning of 'Authentic Text'. Modern Treaty Law / R. Bernhardt, W.K. Geck, G. Jaenicke, H. Steinberger (eds.). Festschrift fur Herrmann Mosler, Berlin/Heidelberg / New York, Springer [in English].

9. Sarcevic, S. (1989). Conceptual Dictionaries for Translation. International Journal of Lexicography, 2(4), 277-293 [in English].

10. Schroth, P. (1986): Translation. American Journal, 1, 47-65 [in English].

11. Snell-Hornby, M. (1988). Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam, Benjamins [in English].

12. Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis; English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [in English].

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