The Native Speaker Principle and its Place in Legal Translation

This paper seeks to examine, in the context of legal translation and focussing on the language pair German/English, the relevance of the native speaker principle to this specialist field. The research, spawned by the disparity in professional practice between the UK and Germany, directs attention away from fluency aspects and towards other equally-relevant factors which should not be overlooked when considering the prerequisites for translating law and, adopting a case-study approach using professional legal translators, sets out to ascertain the place of the native speaker principle in legal translation by asking two intrinsically-linked questions: a) can a non-native speaker of the target language produce an adequate legal translation? and b) does a native speaker of the target language automatically always produce an adequate legal translation? Reiss' model for translation quality assessment forms the basis of the analysis and is used to set up a hierarchy of parameters for the assessment of adequacy. The findings indicate that non-native speakers of the target language can indeed produce adequate legal translations, that these must not necessarily be inferior in terms of fluency and, most interestingly, that native speakers of the target language themselves do not always produce fluent, let alone adequate, translations. The paper therefore concludes that, given its very individual nature, translation competence is too complex to be subject to a principle as arbitrary as the native speaker principle and highlights the pitfalls and problems of an ethical nature of applying the native speaker principle as a blanket principle when commissioning legal translations.