Abstract
Linguistic knowledge at the micro-level helps the users of language in professional and technical settings. The specialized language is registered according to its use and jargon, according to the users. The register of the law is called legalese. Where ever the legalese is not the mother tongue of its users it creates problems. The legal documents are notorious for their complexity. The Govt. Pakistan has started efforts to translate the body of law into Urdu. The present study intends to check the utility of the Urdu translation of the legalese in Pakistan. The court documents are the population of the study, but the court decisions are the selected sample. The study has taken the Panama Case decision as a sample to check its level of comprehensibility as compared to the previous practice of court decisions in English. The level of difficulty and the level of comprehensibility are two variables selected by the legal documents. The study is evaluative and descriptive in design. It is from the Forensic linguistic point of view. The sample was electronically as well as manually analyzed. The texts were prepared and distributed among randomly selected civilians whose education level was between graduation and masters as group one and lawyers as group two. They were given the text to go through the two documents, one in English and the other in Urdu. It was assumed that the translation of the technical language of the law would help in understanding the mother tongue of the users. It aimed at analyzing the scope of translation of the technical legal language. The general findings of the study indicated that the comprehensibility level increased in Urdu translation in the general parts of the document, but the complexity level of the understanding of legal language remained almost the same. This was due to the density of the legal register, which comprises more than half of the whole text. The Urdu translation has limited success in improving the level of comprehension is even more difficult to understand the absence of a proper database. It is the need of the hour to bring about some innovations in the field.
Rehana Yasmin Anjum, Behzad Anwar. (2019) THE URDU TRANSLATION AND THE COMPREHENSIBILITY OF THE REGISTER OF LAW, Journal of Social Sciences & Interdisciplinary Research, Volume 8, Issue 1.
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