Translators depending on legal glossaries: a lexicographical study

Abstract

Rapid development of the world as a global village has eliminated cultural and language barriers in between countries around the world. Especially communication is one of the basic needs of human beings and translations make it easier. Translations can be simply explained as translating a text from source language to target language. Translations differ according to its variety. For instance literary translations differ from legal translations. Literary translations, religious translations, technical translations, legal translations and scientific translations are major translation varieties and this paper focuses its attention on legal translations and whether legal translators can depend on legal glossaries. A legal translation consists many legal terms and meaning of these lexis should be direct, specific and clear. Thus legal translators use legal glossaries to find out the accurate legal term which belongs to target language. This reduces the difference between translations. But some legal glossaries in Sri Lanka have not been updated. Thus, Sinhala legal terms in legal glossaries and legal terms in present usage differ. This is a critical problem encountered by legal translators. Researcher has analyzed the legal glossary published by the Department of Educational Publications and findings showed that glossary consists many out dated Sinhala legal terms which are not used in the present day court. Researcher hopes to extent this research in order to analyze other legal glossaries and intend to use different strategies to find solutions to this issue.