Commented Translation of an Opinion of the State of New York Court of Appeals

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This master’s graduation project compiles the analysis of the translation process of a legal document from English of the United States English into Colombian Spanish entitled: “No. 26 159 MP Corp v. Redbridge Bedford”, a judicial opinion that contains information about an appeal process in a New York Court of Appeals regarding a commercial lease. The translator illustrates the problems faced during the translation process due to the issues implicit in legal translation, particularly when the source and the target texts belong to different legal systems: the common law and the civil law. In view of this, a specific methodology proposed by Prieto (2011) and based on an integrative process-oriented approach was adopted to overcome those problems, and demonstrate the usefulness of the theory of the functional legal equivalent developed by Šarčević (1997) to solve terminological incongruences. This work also includes a bilingual glossary of legal terms based on the terms found in the source text and a recommendation of several resources for translators that undertake legal translation projects. The analysis conducted in the process provides a starting point for those translators who see themselves involved in the field of legal translation and pretend to be highly committed with this delightful but challenging work.