The Most Common Problems in Translations of Employment Documents in Terms of the Naturalness of Translation

Abstract

In the context of the European free movement of workers, there si a demand for translations of employment-related documents in the Slovak market. These draw terms and language structures from both EU and national legal systems. By analyzing our own compiled corpus of agency translations from French to Slovak language, we tried to differentiate problematic elements of the terminology, collocational and syntactic level in terms of functionality of the text and in terms of naturalness of the translation. Translators are subject to the trap of literal translation and polysemous words. Long, compound sentences typical of prescriptive language and contractual texts are also a pitfall. This paper is part of a corpus research on labour law texts, from which recommendations for the translation of typical linguistic features and for the use of available tools should emerge.