Translation issues in Kurdish-English official documents: A contrastive-comparative approach

Abstract

An official translation embraces the translation of any text that functions as a legally binding instrument, depending on countries' particular legal systems. It therefore requires the translator to have a specialised knowledge simultaneously of different legal systems, terminologies and concepts. This study explores the translation of different official documents from Kurdish into English as means to reflect features of legal translation and legal variances between the two cultures. The aim is to reconnoitre the characteristics of legal Kurdish and English within their legal contexts plus the challenges of legal translation. The study examines a parallel corpus of official documents including the rhetorical structure of seventy-five Kurdish texts translated into English. The texts are written in Sorani Kurdish and translated into English by authorised translators. A contrastive-comparative approach using a function-based methodology is used in order to determine official translation norms. The study presumes that the texts and their translations do not share any typical formal features since they are motivated by two different cultures. The findings indicate that they are indeed different from each other by a particular traits of lexis, form and style that are context-specific and customary as anticipated.