Translating property law terms: an investigation of Greek notarial deeds and their English translations

摘要

Although the idea or philosophy of property underlies property law in all systems and countries, at least in Europe, there are vast differences in the way the concept of property is perceived and interpreted from one system to another and from one country to another. Despite the differences, there is an increasing need for translation and especially for the translation of notarial deeds for the sale of land/apartments/buildings given the growing migration within the EU. The present paper investigates the translation of property law terms from Greek into English and by extension the transfer of legal system-bound concepts between the Greek civil law system and the English common law system. In particular, a corpus-driven methodology is used and a parallel corpus consisting of 20 notarial deeds in Greek and their translation into English is analysed in order to determine how terms, and the underlying concepts, are handled by professional legal translators. The analysis is based on Sarcevic's categories of equivalence and on her classification of translation strategies.