The Translation of the Preposition sur in French Legal Language: A Case Study

Abstract

The research on specialized translation of legal texts has focused extensively on the descriptive and applied aspects of its terminology. Nowadays, this situation is shifting and the works on the analysis of the phraseology of the different specialized fields of knowledge are attracting an ever-growing interest. This paper aims to present a case-study carried out from the collection and analysis of a group of expressions pertaining to the French legal language preceded by the preposition sur and their translation into Spanish. The text corpus belongs to the professional practice of translation. To this end, the relevance of the subject discussed will be justified and immediately after the methodology used will be explained; subsequently, a brief theoretical overview of the notion of preposition will be presented and our study will be illustrated with the assistance of examples in context. The role played by specialized legal dictionaries in the translation process of legal phraseology will be equally analyzed. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn and a series of possible future lines of research will be considered.