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The main challenge of translating or teaching legal English in Brazil is dealing with culturally specific terminology from the Common Law system that finds no precise correspondent, in Portuguese, within the Civil Law system or, even worse, that may lead the average “lay” person to a false cognate perception. Our main goal, thus, is to study possibilities that can help overcoming this hindrance, using, in this endeavor, a few techniques offered by international authors as well as examples/cases to help taming the difficulties.
Terms that may seem simple to those of us who have been, at some point in life, immersed into the Common Law system, such as “discovery process”, “act”, “appeal”, “collections”, “summons”, “process server”, “quitclaim deed”, “ordinances”, “eminent domain”, “jurisdiction”, and many others, have been leaving Portuguese speaking legal professionals, in general and, particularly, legal translators from Brazil in doubt regarding its meaning.
The need for translating legal texts develops along with the increase in volume of international traffic of people and goods in a globalized world of business and social interchange. International organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the ICC (International Chamber of Commerce), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), amongst others, use English as a lingua franca and tend to dedicate a department of their organizational structure to the translation and interpretation of languages in order to face the international and multilingual nature of the relationships they deal with. A significant portion of the translations in reference involves legal documents and procedures.
Our attempt is, hence, to provide discussions and tools that can help the above-mentioned professionals better attend to their client’s needs.
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