Selected problems of translation of German and Polish documents concerning the law of succession

Abstract

The article is a practical contribution in which, on the basis of inheritance documents used in international legal transactions, an attempt is made to prove that in order to achieve functional equivalence, that is in order to find in the target language the most natural equivalents for text units from the source language, the translation of such texts cannot be limited to translating words or terms only with the use of dictionaries and lexicons. Searching for functional equivalents has to be based on a multifaceted linguistic analysis of parallel texts, which makes it possible to use customary means and ways of text formation characteristic of a given specialist text in the process of translation.