Legal Translation in Theory and Practice aims not only to equip readers with theoretical instructions for translating legal information from Czech into English but also to present practical examples of an approach to translating the new Civil Code.
The publication is divided into three chapters. The first chapter provides a thorough analysis of the process of legal translation, formulates basic rules for translating legal texts and defines the scope of legal and linguistic knowledge and translation skills. The second chapter focuses on translating legal regulations, and sets the legal and linguistic starting points for translating Czech laws into English, compares linguistic approach to the legislative process in the Czech Republic and in some English-speaking countries. It presents a brief characteristic of the Civil Code language and an analysis of various varieties of legal English as well as some grammatical phenomena that are fundamental for translating (and not only) the Civil Code. The five sections of the third chapter demonstrate a practical approach to translating the Civil Code into English. The first section covers the technical legislative elements of the Civil Code and its system, while each of the other four sections covers a section of the new Civil Code: general part, family law, absolute property rights and relative property rights. Each section contains a selection of provisions which are difficult from translation perspective either due to the choice of Czech linguistic means or due to the ambiguity of the Czech text which may lead to different interpretations.