Los actos procesales: estudio macroestructural contrastivo (inglés/español) aplicado a la traducción

Abstract

Procedural acts represent one of the most complex linguistic genres within the court sphere. Their schematic structures are rarely homogeneous across legal systems, and hence, they
present a crucial obstacle to translation. This fact becomes particularly relevant with regard to such diverse legal systems as Spanish continental law (Civil Law) and Anglo-Saxon case law (Common Law). For this reason, we aimed at analyzing the macrostructure of these documents, especially of court decisions, the most frequent and representative translation briefs from the court sphere. In order to achieve our goal, we selected a corpus of 30 documents, distributed as follows: 10 British judgments, 10 North American judgments, and 10 Spanish judgments. Our findings show macrostructure convergences and divergences, that must be taken into consideration in order to achieve successful translations (English-Spanish) at the workplace.