Legal Culture

Legal translation is a special type of Language for Special Purposes (LSP) translation involving cross-linguistic communication in the legal context and it tends to involve more cultural specific components. Since the main functions of legal language are normative and performative, it is important to make sure what the actual purpose of the translation of a legal text is. On the other hand, legal translators are expected to produce not parallel texts but texts that are equal in legal effect. So, they must be able to understand not only the legal concepts and the legal effects they are supposed to have, but also how to achieve those legal effects in the target language, especially when it is based on a different legal system. The vast differences in Persian and English legal systems and legal cultures, and consequently the associated incongruity of terminology, highlight the many challenges in legal translation. This paper aims at presenting a strategy through which we can convey the legal culture of SL (Persian) to TL (English) and while creating similar legal effect in TL, improve the quality of legal translation, relying on the two notions inspired by Venuti (1998), i.e. domestication and foreignization. In this regard we analyzed legal translation of 20 Persian to English Divorce Decrees within the domain of Private law, the study of which has been seldom attempted despite the customary presence of these instruments in the legal routine. As a result of this analysis we can conclude that legal texts in different legal systems are translatable and a similar legal effect can be created in TL provided that the legal genre of the source text is preserved and also functional and conceptual equivalences are employed through foreignization and domestication.