Criminal Record Checks in United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Spain: Contrastive Analysis Applied to Translation

Abstract

In the last few years, Spanish law firms’ workload and foreign business activity in Spain have increased. The number of English-speaking immigrants in the Peninsula has also substantially risen. These events make the English<>Spanish translation of Police and Crime Law documents in general and criminal records in particular of utmost importance. Nevertheless, we have noticed that this topic has never been researched to date. That is the reason why we analyzed and compared 70 criminal records, real translation briefs from 2012 and 2013, 10 from Spain, 10 from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 10 from Scotland, 10 from USA, 10 from Canada, 10 from Australia and 10 from New Zealand. Our aim was to identify several divergences and facilitate the translation task; both direct (English-Spanish) and reverse (Spanish-English), of the text typology originated from this branch of Crime Law. Our findings show striking differences after an interlinguistic and an intralinguistic analysis.