Traducció comentada de l’anglès al català d’un Sound Recording Labor Agreement

Abstract

The way labor agreements protect employees’ rights is a subject widely addressed by the academic community. When it comes to the field of translation, however, we find very little reference works that offer insight on how to tackle translation difficulties arising from this genre. Through a simulated translation assignment, this paper aims to present the solution to some of its main problems, the first one being the multiple translation equivalents of the term “agreement” into Spanish and Catalan. We also intend to contribute to clarifying the differentiation between collective labor agreements and individual contracts of employment. From the viewpoint of language, the syntactical complexity that generally characterizes contract drafting in the US supposes an extra problem when translating legal documents. We want to tackle these issues by a research through specialized dictionaries and by looking into the legal context of labor agreements in the United States and Spain. We intend to solve syntactical problems by following recommendations in reference works and by defining our own strategies based on real translation examples. Firstly, results show that “agreement” has indeed multiple equivalents depending on the context. Secondly, we reach the conclusion that collective labor agreements differ from individual contracts of employment mainly in their specific content and in their condition of statute. Moreover, this paper proves there are several translation strategies that pursue a simplified legal language: omission, addition, internal punctuation, etc. To conclude, it is important to note that the genre of labor agreements requires in-depth study in order to carry a more manageable exercise of translation.