| Title: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES IN TRANSLATING LEGAL TEXT FROM ENGLISH TO THE IGBO LANGUAGE |
| Authors: Christopher Chinedu Nwike, Nigeria |
| This study focuses on the translation of the Procedure for commencing cases in customary courts in Enugu State, Nigeria, with the goal of identifying the challenges encountered in the translation process and potential solutions to these challenges. The source text (ST) is an English-language legal document produced by Women Information Network (WINET) that aims to inform the Igbo citizens of Enugu State about the process of seeking redress through the customary court. Regrettably, a sizable number of the State’s citizens who will benefit from the document do not comprehend the technical language used in its preparation. Therefore, the goal of this study is to translate the legal text into Igbo in order to identify translation issues and highlight the necessity of having legal papers intended for a particular group of people be in either basic English or their native language. The researcher adopts Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation principles and methodologies, as well as Toury’s descriptive translation studies, to the translation of legal texts. The practical translation issues are identified and discussed in the study. It also notes that, in general, the jury’s use of legal jargon in drafting these documents results in a lack of clarity in the information presented in legal texts, which is the root cause of legal translation issues. To improve clarity and make the most use of legal documents, the current study suggests that legal works be made available to the public in their native languages through translation or plain English. |
| Keywords: Translation, Terminology, Lexical-semantics, Stylistics. |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.59009/ijlllc.2023.0049 |
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