Translation Errors in Serbian Legal Regulations and eir Impact on Text Interpretation and Law Application

Law, in addition to government, is the main element of every state, and it is woven from a whole set of legal regulations. Language is the main tool for expressing the legal content of regulations. Proper application of the regulation and understanding of the will of the person who made the regulation primarily implies linguistic interpretation and understanding of the content of the translated document (as stipulated in the Translator’s Charter). Namely, adequate implementation and application of a legal regulation, written in a foreign language, first requires a linguistic understanding of that regulation, which is the essence of the normative interpretation of law, and errors that may occur in the process of implementing the law are inevitably connected with the misinterpretation of the same. For the purpose of the topic of our paper, we have excerpted and analyzed a convenient sample of the official Serbian translation of the Rome Statute. The translation solutions were then cross examined and special emphasis was put on whether the truthfulness of the translation was conveyed to the target language, Serbian. In our preliminary analysis of the text, the hypothesis was that comparing the source text with the translation would show different translation solutions. Further examination was aimed at analysing the discrepancy of the source text with its translation and how such a result would jeopardize the correct interpretation of the Rome Statute. Final results showed that some of the errors did significantly alter the essence of the source text. Some examples showed wrong register usage whereas others showed a complete misunderstanding of the source text. In order to forestall such a translation “mismatching”, any type of specific document (in this case legal text) should be translated by a language and translation expert (again, as stipulated in the Translator’s Charter).