Teaching contrastive analysis and translation of synonyms as a problem of teaching legal translation to Russian speaking learners at law faculties

The article discusses the possibilities of differentiation and subsequent translation of synonyms in legal English when teaching Russian-speaking students in a law school. The nature and types of synonyms in Russian and English legal languages significantly differ, and there are fundamental differences in their respective legal systems. The analysis presented in the article is based on the material of commercial Anglo-American law. The first part of the article describes the vocabulary composition of the presented material and the types of synonyms. The synonyms revealed are as follows: full contextual synonyms, full dialectical correspondences, incomplete synonyms and their varieties, duplets and triplets. Cases of false synonymy are also considered as they involve words related to similar concepts but which are not synonymous. The second part justifies and describes the techniques of contrastive analysis of the identified synonyms within the given course of study, which are effective in educating future lawyers. These techniques include identifying at least one distinguishing semantic feature that manifests itself in all contexts; one or more non-overlapping meanings and at least one overlaping meaning; discrepancies in stylistic features, compatibility; hypernym-hyponym relationships; complete synonyms; duplets and triplets, as well as false synonyms. The article concludes with recommendations related to translation of the identified types of synonyms and summarizes the results obtained.