Garzone stress, this character of complexity.
“For the translator, this complexity - often bordering on obscurity - not only makes the decoding task more arduous, but in many cases also requires a real hermeneutic effort on her/his part, far beyond the scope of the ordinary decoding and interpreting required for other kinds of translations” So hermeneutic efforts in the translator's part, “this is highly problematic. While legal professionals, like lawyers, judges, and jurists are competent in the hermeneutics as part of their essential armoury of skills, it is usually not so for the translator, who, in her/his interpreting effort, is constantly at risk of overstepping the limits of her/his professional competence"
There are juridical concepts in Roman law that simply do not exist in common law legal systems, and viceversa
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- Juridical concepts that do not exist in common law systems are, for example, potestà dei genitori, dolo, forza maggiore
- Juridical concept that do not exist in Roman law: bail, estoppel, trespass.
- Concept that bear the same name but, not being correspondent, are false cognates. False friends: contract, which is not contratto, ma appalto. Civil law, which can be diritto civile, but it's basically Roman law, so it's usually used in opposition with common law, which again is not diritto comune, ma the British system, basically the system of based on use, diritto consuetudinario potremmo dire, but, it's not. It usually is not translated into Italian. It's used as it is as alone common law civil law.
- Translating procedures necessary to overcome these difficulties are called legal transposition
And this trait of being legally binding bring us to the notion of legal equivalence- when the need was felt to define new criteria of equivalence specific to legal translation. The principle of legal equivalence adds the consideration of the legal effects, so not only equivalent in meaning and intention, but also in effects.
According to the principle of legal equivalence, the translation of a legal text will seek to achieve identity of meaning, as I just said, between original and translation, which is two folded so it can be intended as identity of propositional content, but also as identity of legal effects, while at the same time, pursuing the objective of reflecting the intents of the person or body which produced the source text.