Designing an English-Romanian glossary of English Criminal Law for interpreters and legal professionals using electronic corpora

• Main Author: Zhekov, Monica A.
• Published: Middlesex University 2017
• Subjects: 345.242
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.713728

The present research addresses the challenges faced by the public service interpreter to find linguistic equivalence between English and Romanian in the framework of UK Criminal Law and manage the discontinuity between the UK and Romanian legal systems. The project’s objective is to examine specific lexical-contextual difficulties encountered in the professional practice and the availability of equivalent terminology in translation. Grounded on my professional practice and through investigations of practicing interpreters I analyse the structure and meaning of these non-equivalent terms, and establish equivalence by means of complex electronic queries using the collocation method. The findings validated by experienced practitioners are made available online as a concise glossary. The specific terminology is based on my observations in the UK courts for a period of three years and through professional inquiry among my colleagues. The second objective of my project is to empower both beginner and practicing interpreters across all languages to use the resources available to them in their workplace to resolve their terminological non-equivalence stepping further in their professional journey. A seven step model is established based on my practice and research project to provide guidance on how to turn the data available to them into resources they need for the non-equivalence of legal terminology in their specific language pairs. The project report is considered as a resource seeking to establish good practice provides relevant applications in certain contexts and as such can be recontextualised. The research contributes the profession by making available a concise but useful glossary for the Romanian interpreters and practitioners on the legal field in the UK. By means of cooperation with the fellow professionals, I developed a model of self-building glossary in easy to follow steps and with a minimum prerequisite of lexicographic knowledge or advance computing skills.