Yana Mykolaivna Vakulich
Email: yanavakulich1902@gmail.com
Senior Lecturer
Kyiv University of Law of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/StudLing2025.26.9-18
ABSTRACT
The article explores the systemic relationships between Ukrainian legal terms and their English equivalents in the context of legal translation. The analysis focuses on key terms that reflect differences between Ukraine’s continental legal tradition and the common law system of English-speaking countries, such as the USA and the UK. It is established that direct equivalence between terms is often complicated due to semantic, syntactic, cultural, and pragmatic disparities, which impact translation accuracy. The methodology includes a theoretical literature review, comparative analysis of parallel texts such as contracts, court decisions, and regulations, as well as an evaluation of practical translation aspects. The study identifies major challenges, including terminological ambiguity, syntactic differences, and cultural context, and proposes strategies to address them: utilizing legal corpora for term usage analysis, collaborating with native speakers and legal experts, creating specialized glossaries, and implementing modern technologies, such as machine translation. The findings hold theoretical significance for the development of translation studies, enhancing the understanding of terminological systems, and practical value for improving the quality of legal translations amid globalization. Special attention is given to the importance of accurate translation for Ukraine’s integration into international legal frameworks, such as the European Union. The conclusions emphasize the need to expand the corpus of analyzed texts and develop standards for translation unification, fostering its professionalization. The article targets translators, lawyers, and researchers in the field of English philology.
Keywords: legal translation, English-Ukrainian translation, terminology, equivalence, legal systems, translation studies, standardization, globalization.
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