Lexical Challenges of Translating Arabic Legal Texts into English among University Graduates

This paper sheds light on the lexical challenges university graduate translators face when rendering Arabic legal texts into English. It seeks particularly to examine the impact of lexical peculiarities of legal language in attaining the desired legal effect in the TT since the lack of these lexical ones leads to create significant legal translation obstacles. The paper analyses qualitatively and quantitively the translations of five Arabic legal texts into English by (20) graduate students from Jadara University, Jordan grounded on Šarčević’s model of functional equivalence and lexical features of legal language. The study has revealed that the eminent lexical challenges noticed in this particular area are signalled by the pervasiveness of partial legal equivalence followed by the near legal equivalence. Furthermore, the absence of formality, synonyms, highly specialized terms and inappropriate equivalence are found to create a major lexical barrier to rendering Arabic legal documents into English. In contrast, the absence of proper modality, couplings, and archaic terms are proven to play a minor role in complicating this task. The said lexical challenges are proven to contribute enormously to the distortion of the desired legal effect in the TT, notably associated with the obliviousness to the lexical conventions and technicality peculiar to legal language, high dependency on machine, literal translation in conjunction with a noticeable semantic and linguistic incompetence in the language involved. Additionally, Šarčević’s functional equivalence is noticed to be of a reasonably potential utility for choosing the fitting legal equivalence in this arena.