Legal Translation. An analysis of Business Contracts in Italian and translated into English

Nowadays, contracts are legal documents ordinary people are likely to be most familiar with. Written contracts are important in business because they outline expectations for both parties, protecting each party if those expectations are not met, making it easier to solve any disputes that might arise. This work focuses on the analysis of a small corpus of business contracts written in Italian and translated into English. Attention is paid to the language used by lawyers to draft the contracts and the translation techniques applied by legal translators. For the purpose of this study, we assume that both versions of the contract are equally binding in case of a particular legal issue or dispute, maintaining the same legal value. Since Italian and English have different legal systems, absolute equivalence is impossible to achieve. A legal translator has to take into account the original contract and create an equivalent text in English. When applying either version of the contract to a particular legal issue, the legal decision-maker needs to arrive at the same conclusion, regardless of which one is used. Dealing with private legal documents, it is safe to assume that the parties involved will have to seek the assistance of legal professionals. In this specific case, we narrow down our target audience in the last instance to lawyers. And since the target language is English, we assume that contracts are ultimately translated for common-law lawyers. The corpus will