Phraseology in judicial texts: combining a corpus and a genre perspective

Legal translation can be best defined as a process of intercultural communication, since Law represents the cultural and national manifestation par excellence. The poster will illustrate possible strategies to deal with cultural diversity in legal translation. In particular, the focus will be on one of the greatest constraints on legal translators, namely the use of phraseology, which is highly embedded in the context of the specific legal system of each country. The research will concentrate on a particular text-type, i.e. judicial texts in English, Spanish and Italian, and will show the pivotal role of phraseology in translating texts pertaining to Criminal Procedure. A corpus-based genre analysis will be carried out on a range of texts which will vary depending on their availability within each Criminal Law system. Parallel and comparable corpora consisting of texts mainly drawn from official court-documentation in the three legal systems will help to investigate specialized phraseology (e.g. “to lodge an appeal/interponer recurso/proporre ricorso” or “to admit evidence/admitir una prueba/acquisire una prova”, etc.). The aim is to show how, by using correct phraseology, professional translators may succeed in minimizing the inevitable cultural gap between different legal systems by taking on the noble role of the cultural mediator.