Abstract

This paper explores the process of legal translation aiming to gain an insight into the mechanisms that guarantee the quality of translation for legal work. The first part of the paper introduces static equivalence theory, which was developed by the author and serves as a basic framework under which a legal translator operates. In order to achieve static equivalence between the source and the target languages, the author, based on his several-decades of experience doing pragmatic translation (legal translation in particular) and an in-depth retrospective examination (concept-based), has constructed in the second part of the paper a five-step model for the process of legal translation. The model articulates all the essential steps that a legal translator needs to go through in his work, and the interconnections among them. These steps include (1) browsing the text to determine an applicable translation strategy, (2) perusing the text to decode the writer's intent, (3) conducting operative analysis to select a best way of expression, (4) cross-linguistic transfer, and (5) equivalence check by back-translation.