Chapter 13: Specialized Interpretation (Continued)

13.1. Judicial two-way interpreting

Judicial interpreting (judicial genre) has features of similarity with scientific interpreting: it fulfills both cognitive and prescriptive functions. Laws, law drafts, acts, subordinate legislation, conventions of international law have such communicative task. In their typological attributes laws are homogeneous enough. To understand (interpret) any law qualified legal assistance is required.

Cognitive information is contained first of all in judicial terms which possess characteristic attributes – unambiguity, absence of emotional coloring, context independence. Their significant share (private property, victim, delinquency, etc.) is known to general public as the sphere of their application goes beyond legal practice.

Objectivity of presenting information is provided by prevalence of absolute present tense of verb and passive constructions, and its general character – by prevailing semantics of Subject, where alongside with nouns of judicial subject-matter nouns and pronouns with generalizing semantics are widespread.

Prescriptive character of information is rendered by means of verbal structures of modality of necessity and modality of possibility. Judicial terms come forth on general background of neutral literary language norm in its officialese version.

Syntax of this kind of translation is distinguished by completeness of structures, by variety of means, arranging logical connections. Logic structures with the meaning of condition and reason are frequent. Necessity to express each statement fully, clearly and unequivocally, avoiding ambiguous interpretation, leads to an abundance of homogeneous parts of sentence and homogeneous subordinate clauses.

Compression is not peculiar to a judicial text – abbreviations, figures are not typical of it. Indices and personal pronouns are not used either. Tautological cohesion – repetition of the same noun in each following phrase, prevails.

Judicial terms possess archaic coloring that creates the coloration of elevated style. This emotional shade of judicial text is associated with its high status in society.

Conclusions: dominating system attributes in translating a judicial text are those, which precisely impart:

• cognitive information with prescriptive intention;

• shade of elevated style;

• judicial terms, part of them having archaic coloring, are rendered by mono-semantic, unequivocal equivalents; units of translation are words and word-combinations;

• absolute present as a dominating tense form of a verb is rendered by functionally equivalent means; morpheme is a unit of translation;

• passive constructions are rendered by grammatical equivalents, syntactical transformations are used;

• generalizing semantics of Subject is rendered by variant correspondences; word is a unit of translation;

• neutral written literary norm of officialese version is rendered by a complex of lexical and syntactic means, which are in full correspondence with the means of original (variant correspondences, transformations); units of translation – word-combinations and phrases;

• completeness and variety of syntactic structures, types of logical connections, prevalence of structures with the meaning of condition and reason, abundance of homogeneous parts of sentence and homogeneous subordinates, etc., – systematic frequency of these means is reproduced in translation; all rules of formal logic in constructing structures must be observed;

• absence of compression, presence of tautological cohesion are preserved, wherever possible;

• means of arranging elevated style, the degree of coloring are reproduced by means of equivalent/variant correspondences or by means of compensation.