ИСТИНА

Traditionally, translation was considered an exclusively linguistic discipline and activity concerning the comparison of languages for finding equivalents and solutions to untranslatability problems. Traditional approach to legal translation was mostly confined to the use of bilingual dictionaries the entries of which supported the uniqueness of national law and the historical division into two major systems – common law and civil law, maintained the opinion about their sharp distinction and encouraged transliteration or word by word translation. The proposed approach shifts the focus to functional methods where the search for meaning equivalence is replaced by juxtaposition of underlying concepts of the two legal systems. It integrates interpretative, instrumental, communicative, cognitive, meta-linguistic and meta-legal aspects of the mental-lingual process called legal translation.