Translating act titles: a syntactic nightmare
Abstract
Among the several unresolved issues affecting legal-administrative translation into Basque, the problem of act titles stands out. In fact, inserting a long act title into a text is often a syntactic nightmare for both writers and translators, and throws the reader into confusion. When not placed in the right position, lengthy statements of subject matter greatly hinder reading. Every placement in a sentence has been tried in order to make the text understandable: the front, the end, in brackets, between dashes, in footnotes, etc. But no satisfactory remedy seems to have been found. In this article, a possible solution is suggested. For that purpose, a powerful yet long-neglected resource of Basque syntax is put to the test.
