Divergence in the translation of criminal law: A corpus-based study of prohibition in Iraqi penal code and its English translation

As a human interaction, legal discourse is directed to communicate aspects such as obligation, commands, duties, rights, permission and prohibition. These aspects are realised differently in Arabic and English and, thus, need to be translated carefully. The present paper focuses on examining prohibition in the Iraqi penal code and its English translation. This is carried out by compiling a parallel corpus of the Arabic original text and its translation to analyse whether the translation carries any divergence from the source text that can result in an incompatible message being conveyed to target audience. More precisely, parallel concordances are generated to outline the diverse prohibition-coding linguistic structures in Arabic source texts and how they are translated into English. Results are then investigated qualitatively to inspect any divergences in the translation. The corpus-based analysis yield a variety of structures used to communicate prohibition in Arabic and English. The results also indicate that albeit the regulative function is restored, there are differences between the original text and its English translation in terms of the force of imposition of prohibition.