Challenges of Legal Translation with Special Reference to Turkey Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The challenges encountered in translation between the languages of Turkish and English have been long researched whereas those encountered in legal translation between the said languages have been scarcely subject to an indebt analysis. This study focuses on certain categories of translation challenges, investigating limited examples taken from the Turkey judgments of the ECtHR, where certain translation techniques such as equivalence, modulation, adaptation, and etc. are used, in order to reveal and solve semantic and lexical problems mostly arisen from to the differences in legal systems and discourses. In the first place, touching upon the backgrounds of the English and Turkish legal languages and the Turkish legal system, the features of the legal translation will be discussed with special reference to the translated Turkey judgments of the ECtHR. Also, after describing the structure of the ECtHR and its importance for our country, its peculiar language will be discussed briefly. Keeping these important points in mind, this study sets forth to find answers to the questions of what the challenges of translating legal texts between English and Turkish are and how to overcome them.