The Governing-Law Anchor in Legal Translation-A Homicide Case Study

The study is aimed to test the governing-law anchor in the comparative analysis of legal terminology to harmonize the clash of legal cultures in legal translation. It is considered as an adjustment to a juritraductological approach to legal translation which invites legal translators to merge the tools of jurilinguistics, comparative law and traductology in the comparative analysis of legal concepts before selecting a suitable translation solution (Monjean-Decaudin, in: Research methods in legal translation and interpreting, Routledge, 2019). Rather than transposing a text from a source law system to a target law system, legal translators are believed to operate in the bi-semiotic environment of two legal cultures as navigators of their recipients toward understanding the legal concepts under the governing law of the document. To this end a comparative conceptual analysis, that correlates with the parametrization method (Matulewska in Stud Logic Gramm Rhetor 45:161-174, 2016), should be anchored in the analysis of the source law concepts (Sarcevic in New Approach to Legal Translation, Kluwer Law International, The Hague, 2000). First, the componential and taxonomic analyses were used to identify conceptual markers/parameters of source concepts to serve as tertia comparationis for the subsequent search of their functional equivalents in the target legal culture. Source concepts and their functional equivalents were subsequently subject to a comparative componential analysis aimed to reveal a degree of their match based on which coinage operations were activated in selecting suitable translation strategies. We hypothesized that the change in the governing-law perspective would trigger changes in translation solutions. The governing-law-anchored process of comparative analysis was detailed and exemplified by the analysis of the conceptual field of Homicide in the Slovak law, English law, and the US Model Penal Code.