Synonyms as a Challenge in Legal Translation Training

Abstract

Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language is not devoid of it. In fact, legal language involves cases of syntactical synonymy and lexical synonymy as well as cases of absolute and partial synonymy. Therefore synonymy must be addressed in a legal translation classroom to make trainees aware of all the issues that it may involve, as well as of the fact that terms that may be perceived as synonymous by laypeople are not actually synonymous to lawyers (e.g. murder, homicide, manslaughter). What also needs to be addressed in a legal translation classroom are situations of near-synonyms, whose usage is governed by collocational or contextual restrictions (e.g. breach, violate, infringe) and sometimes involves slight nuances in meaning (e.g. liability v. responsibility, or unlawful, illegal, illicit, etc.). This article introduces a step-by-step approach designed to introduce legal translation trainees to a variety of issues related to (non-)synonymy in legal language, and presents a series of exercises that have been prepared to this end in line with the scaffolding approach. Although the exercises are designed for the English–Czech language pair, they are easily transferable to any teaching context involving English.