Translating end-user license agreements: issues, strategies and techniques

The number of goods and services which are sold on the worldwide market makes the translation of end-user license agreements (EULAs) particularly necessary. This study highlights why EULAs may be considered as hybrid texts, which include some of the typical characteristics of legal texts as well as of technical texts, and it observes to what extent these aspects are maintained in the translated text from a qualitative perspective. The analysis makes use of a small corpus of authentic EULAs in English and their Italian translations, and a small comparable corpus of original Italian texts has also been compiled in order to allow for a contrastive analysis. The aim is to highlight the main issues emerging in the translation of this specific text type, as well as the approaches and the techniques adopted (such as transposition, expansion, addition, and elimination).