Translating employment contracts: insights from corpus linguistics

Abstract

This work shows how corpus-based studies can be applied to the field of specialised translation and, more precisely, to the legal translation of employment contracts. Legal language, given its complexity and cultural specificity, presents considerable challenges for translators, and reliance on bilingual dictionaries may not always result in high-quality translations. Corpus methodology applied to translation analysis can offer significant contributions both in terms of advanced linguistic analysis and as a didactic tool for the learning of specialised languages. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to create an ad hoc monolingual corpus of employment contracts to show how corpus analysis is beneficial to legal translation. This paper conducts a corpus-based translation analysis of an employment contract translated from Italian into English. The findings highlight how the use of the corpus helps translate the employment contract in a much more efficient and suitable way, especially in terms of spotting formulaic expressions, finding the correct collocations, and choosing the best translation candidate(s).