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ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on the issue of how translations of legal contents from webpages are received or interpreted within the target legal system. Our hypothesis is that software developers and companies operating in the digital market and offering multilingual contents, which were created originally in English and translated into Spanish, are not only setting the standards for drafting legal texts for publication on the Internet but also coining (or even imposing) equivalents that do not always take into consideration the target legal culture. Indeed, the major IT companies, with their policy of making contracts freely available for downloading, and with the valuable linguistic resources that they produce and distribute, are not only meeting the requirement of keeping their clients informed but are also becoming the new authority on IT terminology and legal translation. The legal texts produced by these companies constitute a multilingual digital corpus of important value for translators and localizers. We assume that translation techniques and equivalences used in the target text satisfy the legal requirements of the consumer's country of residence and are therefore adapted in order to be fully interpreted according to Spanish law. However this is often not the case as is discussed here.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
6. For further English-Spanish corpus resources, see Vargas (2012).
7. Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own.
8. Within the Law10N research project created a corpus of end user license agreements that can be consulted at the following address: http://lawcalisation.com/
9. The Google search engine, which began in 1998, is today used for approximately 80% of all searches. This example is taken from the conditions of use on this link http://www.google.com/intl/es/policies/terms/ [last accessed, 16/04/2014].
10. Judgement 113/13 of the Madrid Fifht Mercantil Court, 30 September 2013.
11. Sections 1281 to 1289 of the Spanish Civil Code.
12. Section 1281 of the Spanish Civil Code.
13. Sections 14–17 of Spanish Law 34/2002, 11 July 2002 on services within the information society and online commerce.
14. In particular, articles 85 and 89 of Spanish Royal Decree 1/2007, of 16 November, which approves the revized text of the General Law on Consumer Protection and other complementary laws.
15. In BHPetroleum v British Steel, 1999 and Ferryways NV v Associated British Ports, 2008.
16. Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations, 1999, regulation 7 establishes that a seller or supplier shall ensure that any written term of a contract is expressed in plain, intelligible language”; Spanish legislation, RDL 1/2007, General Law on Consumer Protection, art. 80.1.a) employs the terms corrección, claridad y sencillez en la redacción.
17. This is the definition that appears in article 2 of Directive 85/577 though, with some slight differences, we can find similar definitions in Directive 90/314, 93/13 and 94/47, among others.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carmen Bestué
Carmen Bestué is a trained Attorney and a Lecturer in Translation from English into Spanish at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She holds a JD degree in Law from the University of Barcelona, a University Degree in Comparative Law from the University of Paris II, Pantheon-Assas and a PhD in Translation Theory from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is the Director of the Postgraduate Degree in Legal Translation at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is the author of Translated Contracts (2013) as well as numerous articles and book chapters.