Cultural Aspects of Legal Translation: The Case of Birth Certificates in French and Portuguese

Abstract

The birth certificate is an extremely important document in the life of a subject, as it is the first document of the citizen to have legal value and to be used as proof of age, nationality and filiation, thus guaranteeing certain rights to the citizen. In order to explore the linguistic, cultural and legal implications of such a document, we start from a corpus of Sworn Translation of birth certificates from French from France (ff) to Portuguese from Brazil (pb) and vice versa, in order to analyze the terms and expressions present in this corpus and how they are doing in this movement of translation. We are, therefore, in a field which encompasses distinct perspectives in relation to specialized translation. Thus, our study is based on the research of Crépon and Rodrigues, concerning the theoretical field of Translation Studies, and the work of Gémar, Peron Guedes and Mozzilo and Harvey with regard to the relationship between Translation and the Law. We have verified that the specificities of Brazilian and French law are either explicitly marked or erased, performing a movement that is both “domestication” and “foreignization” in terms of translation. This study is of major importance once it proposes to discuss the cultural and linguistic relations which are intrinsic to translation practices and whose outlines may be more or less identifiable depending on the contexts in which they occur.