抄録
This paper addresses pragmatic translation errors and ambiguities in Arabic to English legal texts, where translating ambiguous statements from the source language can lead to misinterpretation, thereby negatively affecting the accuracy, clarity, and enforceability of these documents under Iraqi law. Apart from the language comparison, translation is not just a linguistic act in itself and should be duly sensitive to both the import of what was said and to its sociolinguistic context. It is based on a set of 40 legal texts (20 marriage contracts, 20 divorce decrees), obtained from Bashiqa Court and certified translation offices in Northern Iraq. The performance incorporates Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and Facework (Goffman, 1967). This study employs a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative frequency analysis. The present study is the first of its kind as it reviews and categorizes these pragmatic errors into six types: speech-act misrepresentation, modality error, politeness violation, cultural-legal misunderstanding, implicature loss, and referential ambiguity. Pragmatic mistakes are also not an unordered class and abound in legal meaning deliberative expressions, which contribute widely to culture-expressed phrases & modal wording. To improve the quality of legal translation and translator training in multilingual settings such as Iraq, a pragmatic-discursive analytical framework is proposed.
