Legal translation: A sociosemiotic approach

Quite different from translation for general purposes, transplanted legal discourse is often unmatchable to the target discourse community. In reality, exact equivalence could not be found in terms of translation in legal transplant, which means the major task of translation in legal transplant is to solve lacunae, discursive gaps between the source text and the target text. In legal translation, a lacuna seems to constitute a factor of untranslatability. This paper, based on a study of four cases, argues that equivalence can be achieved within the proposed Translational Triangle. The sociosemiotic approach is adopted in this study to explore the complexity in legal translation, and provide insights into legal translation, both theoretically and practically.