Abstract
The importance of translation in Malaysia has never been questioned. However, of late it has become more accentuated. This is especially true of legal translation. Despite this importance, little research has been done thus far on the challenges of translating legal texts and on improving the quality of their translation. This thesis will be one of the more extensive studies to be conducted on legal translation. It focuses primarily on two types of texts, i. e. legislation and lawbooks, and on English-Malay, a language-pair which is less well-documented than other pairs. The thesis examines the source language texts to determine their characteristic features which give rise to difficulties of translating, particularly into Malay. It has often been said that technical terms are the main problem of translating law. The study, which uses a methodology based on text linguistics, finds this to be true but also finds that, depending on the type of legal texts, various other features can be almost as difficult to handle in translation. The type of legal text being translated stimulates different kinds and degree of difficulty. An eclectic method, consisting primarily of a textual analysis and comparative analysis is chosen to enable the variable factors of text-type and language-pair to be investigated effectively. Besides the above-mentioned findings, it is found that there are problems with consistency and standardisation in legal translation which result particularly from certain realities in the target language which are described in the thesis.