Translation of hybrid legal documents in Spain within the context of intercultural communication and civil-law versus common-law systems

The main objective of this article is to analyse the drafting and translation of private legal documents in Spain (mainly from Spanish to English) in order to determine their legal effectiveness and to identify specific traces of hybridism. The hybrid conditions allow us to understand a target text (TT) which shows hybrid characteristics. The source text (ST) being hybrid, the translation assignment or practice determines an additional hybridization in the TT. As hybrids, such documents interest us in several aspects: the law that regulates the document, the cultural elements, the style, the language, and the translation practice. The focus of this article is on private legal documents, and the main case study is a will that has been drafted in two valid versions, since this may show a higher degree of hybridization. We observe how the TT becomes even more hybrid, mainly due to functional reasons as the common-law addressee enters the scene, how a hybrid text may be achieved, and how hybridism is not only harmless but desirable.