R v Johnson: translating English constitutional discourse into Spanish for experts
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Abstract
This work is a translatological study of one of the so-called "Brexit judgements", the wording of which highlights the most important constitutional apparatuses of the United Kingdom. After a brief description of the peculiarities of the Anglo-Saxon constitutional legal discourse, which is quite different from the continental discourse of the Spanish legal system, a detailed study of the macro-structure of R v Johnson, as well as an approach to its major translatological peculiarities, will lead to an exhaustive lexical typology accounting for the translation challenges: the conceptual and lexical gaps arising from the differences between legal systems. Thus, after a count of the 20 key words in the source text by means of Antconc, the lexical phenomena of the sentence will be divided into three groups: institutions, acts and constitutional terms -mostly anisomorphisms-, which entail different levels of difficulty in their translation, some of which present the translator with real problems in making the target text readable. With a qualitative study of the possible strategies to be applied to translation, we will attempt to explain and solve some of the differences and obstacles difficult to overcome for the translator, originated in the different conceptualization of legal discourses and in the different organization of judicial decisions as textual genres.
Keywords: Legal translation, Legal lexicon, Legal genre, Brexit, English constitutionalism.
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