Translating Contracts Between English and Persian: Towards a Pragmatic Approach

Approaches to legal translation and contracts fulfillment have been mostly oriented towards the activity of protecting the contracts, rather than the potential and effective translating clause” and articles from the source language (SL) to the target language (TL). Legal texts are always considered sensitive and demand professional acts of rendering. This study falls into two parts for analyzing and comparing the English-Persian business contracts. First part aims at showing how pragmatic and functional points are significant in legal translation. Corpus was 2 translated versions of 3 authentic contracts, which were of oil, carpet, and gold to be translated by three professional translators certified by a translation office in Tehran, Isfahan, and Kish under the certification of the Ministry of Justice, asking them to translate these texts the way they would successfully deal with legally binding, official documents. Second part is derived from Vermeer s (1989) Skopos theory to the translation of the contracts through a small pilot study between professional translators who know the theory and who do not know. This study shows that critical and standardized legal language features can still be termed to serve the ultimate goal of successfully communicating the message across languages as intended and as commissioned.