Sonia A. Halimi’s research while affiliated with University of Geneva and other places

In the context of international mobility and migration, where highly sensitive documents relating to personal status or qualifications need to be translated, a certified translation of official documents is on the increase. A certified translation requires the involvement of a sworn translator who guarantees the exact reproduction of official documents to be registered with a foreign authority. As a personal status document, divorce decrees must also be translated with rigorous standards in order to be recorded elsewhere. The rules governing Arabic divorce decrees are codified separately in Arabic civil codes and refer to the Family Code or Personal Status Code. Matters related to personal status are subject to religious considerations and contain religiously charged terms that are strictly defined in accordance with the Islamic law and require special attention when translated. This paper aims to explore translation challenges of a particular type of Arabic civil status deed, namely divorce decrees. For this purpose, the study first explains the most prominent concepts relating to certified translation and to Arabic divorce decrees. A number of Arabic divorce decrees are then subjected to a descriptive analysis to define shared linguistic features and to outline the relevant translation techniques in dealing with religiously embedded terminology and phraseology. The relevance of this analysis is assessed by examining a French certified translation of an Arabic divorce document in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the approach to translating this legal genre.

The context-based use of terminology and phraseology is one of the essential building blocks of legal translation. The contextual nature of both components has implications when it comes to designing resources that are adapted to the needs of translators. For Arabic legal translation, there are a multitude of different print and online resources available, however, they do not integrate the context-related parameter for term choice acceptability. In this article, we will describe the main features of certain bilingual legal dictionaries with the English-Arabic and French-Arabic language pairs. We will then make a descriptive assessment of the tools available online, highlighting their limitations. Taking into consideration all the contextual parameters involved in making a translation choice, we will put forward the value of developing bilingual ontologies with Arabic. With the rapid expansion of information technologies, a move towards formalizing legal knowledge will help fill existing gaps in the representation of Arabic legal content and the retrieval of information, providing legal translators with a tool that provides specific details that will enable translators to make informed and relevant decisions, in addition to opening new research perspectives for Arabic legal translation.

The present study examines the implications of judicial translation in the context of international migration and its relationship with the law of the host country. In this context, judicial translation involves highly sensitive documents that can be as varied as family registers and statutory declarations. It also refers to specific legal instances of interaction with judicial authorities in which the observance of certain communication norms is of paramount importance. This is particularly true in the strict setting of a judicial interview. This paper describes how translation is performed in a pre-trial police interview in which the communication of certain basic legal obligations becomes challenging for a migrant person, due to differences in legal backgrounds. In such a situation, the main question is as follows: how can differences in basic legal notions be dealt with in the particularly strict setting of a judicial interview with the assistance of a translator? To answer this question, the study focuses on a threefold challenge for the translator, who must be equipped to handle language, translation and legal/ethical norms. It proposes a translation framework based on these norms and the way in which they are applied in a real interview. It seeks to guide the translation task and serve as a tool for judicial translation training. With regard to the translation norm, the study shows that discursive creation is to be the most relevant technique to represent concepts that do not have counterparts in the target language. Although the foreign element in the new terminology may Ahighlight the boundary between the foreign law and the target legal institution, this technique also leads to the creation of new concepts in the target institution.