Translating Arabic Culture-Specific Legal Terms Into English

Legal translation is a complex practice that involves transferring legal materials between two legal systems. It plays a pivotal role in facilitating cross-border legal processes and international business. However, it is fraught with numerous challenges arising from the inherently culture-dependent nature of law. This corpus-based study aimed at exploring the challenges associated with the English translation of Arabic culture-specific legal terms (CSLTs) used in six Saudi laws. The terms investigated in this study were categorized into four main themes: religious terms, institutions’ names, titles of laws, and miscellaneous terms. The qualitative analysis revealed four main challenges associated with translating these terms: the cultural gap between the source culture (SC) and target culture resulting from adopting different laws, being bound to the SC, the availability of more than one translation of an institution’s name on its official website, and the non-availability of an official website for an institution. Some of these challenges are related to translating all CSLTs in a particular category or more, whereas others are associated with translating only one or two CSLTs in a certain category. Understanding and addressing these challenges is of utmost importance as it directly impacts the target readers’ ability to comprehend translated legal texts accurately

Arabic · Legal culture · Legal Translation · Qualitative analysis · Qualitative research · Legal Language and Interpretation · linguistics and terminology studies · Translation Studies and Practices