Succession instruments in electronic format: Contrastive macrostructure (England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland versus Spain)

Abstract

Nowadays, succession documents translation is one of the most frequent translation briefs. This matter takes on particular importance in countries with a high immigration rate, and that is the case of Spain: as a consequence of immigration of English-speaking people, many legal and sworn (English<>Spanish) translations of testamentary instruments are carried out. In order to achieve this, the knowledge of textual and structural features of legal and family documents in general, and in succession documents in particular becomes essential. This paper reports on the findings of one study whose purpose was to analyse the macrostructure of succession instruments. Our research corpus consists of 90 wills in electronic format: 30 Spanish, 30 for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 30 Scottish. Our analysis results show striking differences in the macrostructure (and grammar) of the legal genre analysed in the legal systems aforementioned. We suggest that the knowledge of macrostructural differences of a complex text genre such as the will contributes to carrying out its bi-directional translation: not only with direct directionality (English-Spanish) but also with reverse directionality (Spanish-English), highly demanded in the current professional market.