Clauses of exemption of responsibility: Translation strategies

This article considers a category of legal clause typical of English and American law, namely the exoneration clause. Both Spanish and French contracts increasingly replicate the layout and structure of equivalent clauses in English-language documents. This, doubtless, is a byproduct of English to Spanish translation and may have been a result of the growing impact of computer tools and especially the Internet. Our aim is to demonstrate, according to a functionalist approach, that the translation strategy and techniques used should factor in not only legal and linguistic criteria but also pragmatic parameters such as communicative and cultural elements.