La traducción jurídica del Código Penal de España al chino. Análisis de los problemas de traducción y propuesta didáctica

Zusammenfassung

This study originates from the lack of existing investigation of legal translation between Spanish and Chinese languages, as well as the shortage of didactic proposals to develop students’ translation competence. The main objective is to identify the problems and difficulties that this specialized language pair and translation domain present, using an empirical study, and an additional objective is to provide a didactic proposal to cover the deficiencies identified. This study is divided into eight chapters. In chapter 1, we introduce the topic, followed by the chapters 2 and 3 in which the theoretical basis of the research is provided, using both descriptive and comparative methodology. Concretely, a series of fundamental concepts and important theories in the legal translation field is presented due to their close relation to the subsequent empirical study: a comparison between the two legal systems and legal languages of Spain and China was carried out, using real examples taken from both criminal codes to demonstrate the theories explored in these two chapters. Chapters 4 and 5 describe the empirical study. The corpus is composed of the written translations of Article 22 of the Criminal Code of the Kingdom of Spain and the subsequent surveys completed by the study subjects at the end of the translation. The written translations are comprised of three different groups: a pilot group of 106 students from the Master's in Intercultural Communication, Public Service Interpreting and Translation at Universidad of Alcalá; a control group of 9 translators with experience in general Spanish-Chinese translation but no specific training in legal translation between the two languages; and a third group represented by the published translation of the Criminal Code of Spain into Chinese. In the data analysis, three different studies are carried out, taking into account each of the groups separately: a quantitative analysis of the errors in the translations of the three groups; a qualitative analysis of the 18 "rich points" extracted from the translations of the three groups; and an analysis of the surveys conducted by the first two groups, in order to identify the problems and difficulties of Spanish-Chinese legal translation. The most important conclusion of this research is that the pilot group has difficulties in every step they take in the process of the legal translation from Spanish to Chinese, indicating a need to develop every translation sub-competence, most likely explained by the linguistic distance between these two languages, differences between the two legal systems, and the shortage of existing translation resources between these two languages. Chapter 6 presents an approach to a didactic proposal based on the results obtained in the empirical study, in order to develop students’ translation competence in this domain. Chapter 7 presents final conclusions, highlighting the limitations of the study and possible future research; and chapter 8 provides the bibliography.