Comparative study of the institution of marriage for English-Spanish translation

Abstract

This study deals with the comparative analysis of the linguistic features that certain sample marriage-related documents in Spanish and English present, including the analysis of linguistic constructions and terminology, so as to test the contextual, cultural and linguistic differences that translating a document in a legal language means, in contrast with the translation of a document in a standard language. In addition, some notions of comparative law, describing the institution of marriage in the corresponding legal systems, Civil Law and Common Law, were introduced, so as to support the differences related to the linguistic analysis. The methodology followed was a deep examination of the language features in the documents, regarding aspects as the structure, the lexicon, uncommon or fixed structures and the legal terminology. The results of the analysis showed many differences in the type of constructions that characterise each legal language, as well as a non correspondence among the terminology used in the two languages and different strategies to accomplish a formal discourse. The conclusions reached are related to the necessity of undergoing both a linguistic and a comparative law analysis in order to produce an adequate translation of a legal document.