The Translation of Juxtaposed Synonymous Adjectives in Legal English into Arabic
Abstract
Legal translators frequently come across two juxtaposed words with closely related meaning during the translation of legal texts. Grammatically, these words can be nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. This paper aims at investigating this phenomenon and the problems that face legal translators while translating one type of these juxtapositions: juxtaposed synonymous adjectives in legal texts. Seven sentences are collected from different English legal texts and given to twenty-five translators. Each one of them contains pairs of synonymous adjectives for which the subjects are asked to pay attention. First, the paper sheds the light on the phenomenon of juxtaposition and synonymy and gives a theoretical background on the use of juxtaposed synonymy in legal English. It also investigates the strategies adopted by translators to solve such problems and proposes alternative strategies if the existing one is inappropriate. The analyses of the data show that the subjects adopt one strategy in which they provide two words as equivalents to the juxtaposed synonymous adjectives. Moreover the study has found out that such rendering constitutes a redundancy in Arabic and is due to the ignorance of the historical reason which is behind the use of such pairs of synonymous adjectives.