The Quality of Translated Legal Terms Regarding Children in the MENA Region: A Comparative Study

This study aims to identify challenges related to the quality of legal terms translated from Arabic to English in laws pertaining to children in five countries in the Middle East and North Africa region: Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The terms describe children’s behaviors that are considered legally and socially unacceptable and adult behaviors that violate laws meant to protect children’s rights in both domestic and foreign contexts. Using a blend of analytical and descriptive methodologies, along with comparative legal research tools and critical discourse analysis, an analytical model called CCFND was developed. This model identifies three primary standards for evaluating translation quality, each with specific criteria for consistency, coherence, and general notes cover features, non-detrimental errors, and detrimental errors. The analysis of 72 legal terms revealed that the translation quality was high, with an equivalence rate of 93.29% for the standard of consistency, a slightly higher rate of 97.92% for the standard of coherence, and a standard equivalence rate along with eight features, one non-detrimental error, and seven detrimental errors. These findings indicate that using various strategies, the translations effectively gained high quality in rendering the terms from Arabic to English. It is suggested that the King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language should develop a bilingual contextual dictionary of effective legal translation strategies for terms and phrases related to children in both national and international laws.