Translating into a new LSP: The translation of laws in the Republic of Cyprus

Stefanos Vlachopoulos
Epirus Institute of Technology, Greece
Abstract

This paper deals with the translation of the English-language Common Law legislation of the Republic of Cyprus into Greek. The legislation introduced to Cyprus in 1935 was common law codified by the British for use in the colonies. The aim of the paper is threefold: (a) to research the historical background and highlight the communicative implications for a community where the language of the law is not the mother tongue of the people, (b) to reconstruct the methods the translators applied when they translated the Law of Civil Wrongs from English into Greek within the common law framework of the Republic of Cyprus, and (c) to establish how the actual process of translation affected the target LSP.

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Table of contents

The law is an abstract construction we can only understand as part of the system it belongs to and the concepts inherent in it are the product of a historical process. This means that a different historical process will usually result in a distinctive system consisting of legal concepts with unique ramifications and—as a consequence—a unique vehicle, a unique language of the law (Vlachopoulos 2004: 100).

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