Page "Legal translation" Paragraph 3

Apart from terminological lacunae, or lexical gaps, the translator may focus on the following aspects.

Textual conventions in the source language are often culture-dependent and may not correspond to conventions in the target culture ( see e. g. Nielsen 2010 ).

Linguistic structures that are often found in the source language may have no direct equivalent structures in the target language.

The translator therefore has to be guided by certain standards of linguistic, social and cultural equivalence between the language used in the source text ( ST ) to produce a text ( TT ) in the target language.

Those standards correspond to a variety of different principles defined as different approaches to translation in Translation theory.

Each of the standards sets a certain priority among the elements of ST to be preserved in TT.

For example, following the functional approach, translators try to find target language structures with the same functions as those in the source language thus value the functionality of a text fragment in ST more than, say, the meanings of specific words in ST and the order in which they appear there.