Übersetzungsorientierte Didaktisierung juristischer Phraseologie

Abstract Legal phraseology is an essential component of legal language, and thus of legal communication, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. It is also one of the main problems in legal translation since legal phraseological units are determined by law-specific factors, and as such are usually unknown to legal translators, who in most cases are not lawyers. As there are still no aids to support the translation of legal phraseology, legal translators struggle with legal phraseology. This is problematic for interlingual legal communication since certain fixed word combinations induce certain extra-linguistic actions in legal practice, thereby triggering legal consequences. A bad translation can cause the action intended by the sender to be omitted or another action to occur. Therefore, the didactization of legal phraseology for purposes of legal translation is a very important task for phraseodidactics. Since there is still no corresponding phraseodidactic approach, this paper proposes a didactic concept for the translation of legal phraseology to familiarize prospective and practicing legal translators with features of legal phraseology, teach them strategies for translating this phraseology, and show them how to develop tools for translating legal phraseology on its own. The paramount goal of such didactics is to ease the translation of legal phraseology and, ipso facto, improve the quality of interlingual legal communication. With this objective in mind, this article first outlines the most important prerequisites of legal translation and then highlights the features of legal phraseology, characterizing the individual types of legal phraseology by their communicative functions using German legal language as an example. Thereafter, the focus shifts to phraseodidactics, which can provide remedies for legal phraseology translation, analyzing the most important phraseodidactic methods so far proposed by phraseodidacticians. In concluding, the article presents a didactic concept for the translation of legal phraseology.