A Pragmatic Analysis of Errors in Translating Iraqi Legal Documents

The current study examines pragmatic translation, mistranslations, and ambiguities in Arabic-to-English legal texts, as ambiguous statements in the source language can be misinterpreted in translation, thereby affecting the quality of these documents (their accuracy, clarity, and enforceability under Iraqi law).Outside the language crux, translation is not merely a linguistic deed, one that must still be sensitive to what was said and to its sociolinguistic milieu.The study is based on a sample of 40 legal texts (20 marriage contracts, 20 divorce decrees) obtained from the Bashiqa Court and certified translation offices in Northern Iraq.It draws from theories such as Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and Facework (Goffman, 1967).Methods: This study uses a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative frequency analysis.The present study is the first of its kind as it reviews and categorizes these pragmatic errors into six types: speech-act misrepresentation, modality error, politeness violation, cultural-legal misunderstanding, implicature loss, and referential ambiguity.Pragmatic mistakes are also not an unordered class and abound in legal meaning deliberative expressions, which contribute widely to culture-expressed phrases & modal wording.To improve the quality of legal translation and translator training in multilingual settings such as Iraq, a pragmatic-discursive analytical framework is proposed.