REQUIREMENTS OF LEGAL DOCUMENT TRANSLATION

Firstly, what makes a legal translation necessary and why it is so important? In this world we all are bounded to a state dimension and with the increasing feelings of belonging to an international reality. This is the main reason for which all aspects of life are subject to translation. Legal translation concerns with the legal world, like press conference held after a summit or to the introduction ceremony of new rules and regulations. Each and every word of a legal document carries some special meaning. Legal translation has different levels at either nationally or internationally, for multilingual country or when one international organization is tried to capture the global market as well. It may be come for regulating legal relationships among the communities of different legal systems and speaking different languages.

Features of Legal documents:-

The unique feature of legal texts is undoubtedly their regaining nature. The legal texts need to follow some unique style and structural rule. These rules need to be observed according to the text and by the translators.
The classifications may be done according to the approach which we need to take with the legal documents at the time of translating the document. This approach helps to distinguish between authoritative and non-authoritative legal contexts. Always a legal text is used with a special concern or purpose. All the special concerns may derive from some functions. Legal texts are informative texts, which aim to provide some information to the readers.


In legal texts there are two functions: regulatory and informative. Regulatory function contains the “code of conduct or norms”, it means it includes regulations of laws, agreements, codes etc. The second function comprises the “Judicial judgment and instructions which carry judicial and administrative ethics”.

In continuation, regulatory functions always include the terms and conditions or agreements of use of certain product. And in informative functions, it may include the judgmental products after certain judicial date of someone.

Language of the legal texts is strictly bounded and it is difficult to speak about the text without considering about legal language. Legal texts are used as confidential documents. The prescriptive role of language feature is shared by all kind of legal documents, to fulfilling the specific goal of the document. The legal rules are commonly divided into prescriptive and descriptive.

All the functions, rules, may be changes according to the nature of the legal system. During the translation of the legal documents translators should always remember about the uses of correct terminology. The main purpose of legal documents, agreements, and other legal activities is use to improve the impact of the people’s behavior.

-Pranjit Kalita

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