Communicative and Textual Competence in Translations of Legal Texts from English into Czech: A Case Study
Abstract
The study addresses the problem of communicative and textual competence using empirical data obtained in a translation experiment conducted with professional translators and advanced translation students. Specifically, it explores stylistic and grammatical errors in translations of legal texts from English into Czech, which account for more than a half of all errors identified in the analysed sample.
The results show that terminology and legal phraseology are a frequent source of difficulty not only in terms of meaning, but also from the linguistic and stylistic point of view. Another large group of erroneous solutions was identified at the syntactic level, including defects of overall textual coherence.
Professional translators achieved better results than translation trainees both in terms of the overall quality and average number of errors; however, as regards the numbers of stylistic and linguistic errors, the performance of both groups was more balanced than in other categories.