Calquing as a Functional Legal Translation Procedure: French-Mediated Arabic-English Translation in Moroccan Private Legal Documents

DOI https://doi.org/10.63585/XGJO6641

Article information

Abstract

Calque (also calquing) is conventionally classified as a direct translation procedure in which the constituent elements of a source-language term are reproduced literally in the target language. In legal translation, it is often associated with excessive literalism and the risk of importing foreign structures into the target language. This article argues, however, that calquing can perform a functional and legally protective role when translation occurs between legal systems that do not correspond neatly. Focusing on Arabic-English sworn translation in Morocco, the study analyses a corpus of two authentic private legal documents, a court judgment and a sale contract, in which the relevant calquing instances are explicitly attested. The translations examined are professional sworn translations produced by two experienced Moroccan sworn translators accredited by the Ministry of Justice. Particular attention is paid to the mediating role of French, whose terminology remains closely linked to Moroccan legal and administrative discourse. Using contrastive and contextual analysis, the article evaluates the principal calquing cases in relation to legal-conceptual accuracy, institutional correspondence, source-system visibility, and target-reader comprehensibility. The findings suggest that a successful legal calque is not merely a literal copy but a deliberate micro-level procedure that preserves the legal identity of a source-system concept and avoids false equivalence with a superficially similar target-system institution. The article therefore proposes a context-sensitive account of calquing and highlights French-mediated transfer as a significant feature of Moroccan Arabic–English sworn legal translation.

Keywords: calque; legal translation; functional translation; French-mediated translation; private legal documents; Arabic-English translation; Moroccan legal system

How to cite | Citation

Download

Download the full article (PDF)

CC BY 4.0 — This article is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).