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Minimal Unit of Legal Translation vs. Minimal Unit of Thought
The chapter features a theoretical viewpoint on an elusive notion of a ‘minimal unit of translation’ which is believed to underlie a technical mastery of translation in general and legal translation, in particular. Consequently, it is hoped to bear relevance to the core legal translation studies issues. However, no essential conceptualization has been undertaken to-date regarding a ‘unit of legal translation.’ This slows down the postulating of such crucial concepts for the legal translation theory and practice, as equivalence and semantic invariant, legal meaning nature and structure, practicable legal translation quality assessment criteria, and other vital issues. The legal translation theoretical framework may eventually benefit from the in-depth observations of several cases reviewed with a view to extrapolating them further on and using in larger legal translation data analysis. Some regularities of the English–Russian legal languages switch, describing respective techniques employed, are also elaborated on and discussed in detail.