Legal Translation and Translator Training
Francisco J. Vigier Moreno
Contents
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
Legal Translation

Legal texts

Legal translation as a profession
Legal Translator Training

Legal translator competence

My experience in training legal translators
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Legal translation  translation of legal texts
• What is a legal text?
1. A text dealing with legal concepts?
 A very extensive text typology
2. A text involved in legal proceedings?
 A very extensive text typology
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• What is a legal text? (2)
3. A text orginated from a legal (communicative) situation?
 A very extensive text typology
4. A specialised text pertaining to the legal field?
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Legal text
– It is difficult to give a definition
– It comprises many different situations and actors
– There is an overlap with related fields (administrative texts,
commercial texts, financial texts, institutional texts…)
 interdisciplinary nature of law and legal translation
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
– Prototypical legal texts (legal terminology and phraseology)
• Legislative texts
• Judicial texts
• Law reports
• Deeds and wills
• Contracts
• Administrative texts
• Research papers (on legal matters)
• Textbooks…
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• How to translate legal texts?
– Specialised field (previous expert knowledge required)
– Legal discourse (technical, but also obscure, archaic,
ambiguous…)
– Legal asymmetry / cultural anisomorphism (different legal
systems and cultures)
– Lack of conceptual and terminological equivalence, especially in
those terms related to procedures, institutions and personell
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Legal translation profession
• Ever increasing activity as a result of globalisation
– In-house translators at international organisations and bodies
(e.g. EU and UN)
– In-house translators at translation agencies
– Freelancers (working for companies and individuals)
– In-house staff of international law firms, businesses, agencies,
NGOs… with duties including internal translations
– In many countries, state-certified official translators (In Spain,
Traductor-Intérprete Jurado; no British counterpart)
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Common problems faced by a legal translator
– Responsibility and deontology
– Lack of recognition
– Lack of resources (for certain language pairs)
– Unrealistic deadlines
– Illegibility of originals
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Translator Competence
• Consensus as to competence-based translator training (Hurtado
2007)
• Training programmes are orientated towards the development of
translator competence
• Consensus as to translator competence as a macrocompetence
including the skills, abilities, knowledge, aptitudes and attitudes
which must be attained in order to carry out a translation task
successfully to a professional standard
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Kelly (2002)
– Communicative and textual competence
– Cultural and intercultural competence
– Thematic competence
– Instrumental and professional competence
– Psychophysiological competence
– Interpersonal competence
All of them governed by strategic competence
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Kelly (2002)
– Communicative and textual competence
– Cultural and intercultural competence
– Thematic competence
– Instrumental and professional competence
– Psychophysiological competence
– Interpersonal competence
All of them governed by strategic competence
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• EMT (2009)
– Translation service provision competence
(interpersonal and production dimensions)
– Language competence
– Intercultural competence
(sociolinguistic and textual dimensions)
– Information mining competence
– Thematic competence
– Technological competence
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• EMT (2009)
– Translation service provision competence
(interpersonal and production dimensions)
– Language competence
– Intercultural competence
(sociolinguistic and textual dimensions)
– Information mining competence
– Thematic competence
– Technological competence
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Legal translation competence (Prieto 2011)
– Strategic or methodological competence (which controls the application of the
other competences)
• Analysis of translation briefs, contextualisation and general work planning
• Identification of problems and implementation of translation procedures
• Self-assessment and quality control
– Communicative and textual competence
•
Linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic knowledge
• Knowledge of legal language uses and legal genre conventions
– Thematic and cultural competence
• Knowledge of legal systems, legal sources and branches of law
• Awareness of asymmetry between legal notions and structures
– Instrumental competence
• Specialised resources, information and terminology management
• Use of parallel documents
– Interpersonal and professional management competence
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Legal translation competence (Prieto 2011)
– Strategic or methodological competence (which controls the application of the
other competences)
• Analysis of translation briefs, contextualisation and general work planning
• Identification of problems and implementation of translation procedures
• Self-assessment and quality control
– Communicative and textual competence
•
Linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic knowledge
• Knowledge of legal language uses and legal genre conventions
– Thematic and cultural competence
• Knowledge of legal systems, legal sources and branches of law
• Awareness of asymmetry between legal notions and structures
– Instrumental competence
• Specialised resources, information and terminology management
• Use of parallel documents
– Interpersonal and professional management competence
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Legal translation competence (Prieto 2011)
– Communicative and textual competence
• Knowledge of legal language uses and legal genre conventions
– Classification of legal genres
– Comparative legal linguistics (features of legal discourse in source and target
languages and jurisdictions)
– Thematic and cultural competence
• Knowledge of legal systems, legal sources and branches of law
• Awareness of asymmetry between legal notions and structures
– Practical principles of comparative law (contrastive analysis of concepts in the
legal systems)
– Instrumental competence
• Specialised resources, information and terminology management
– Dictionaries, Terminological Databases, legislation, reference works, etc.
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
LEGAL TRANSLATION TRAINING PROGRAMMES
Undergraduate (basic training)
• Legal asymmetry
• Basic legal knowledge and phraseology
• Basic texts with legal contents (journal articles or
administrative texts)
• Identification of translation problems
• Translation procedures to resolve those problems
• Documentation skills applied to legal translation
• Focus on the process rather than on the product
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Postgraduate (advanced training)
– Equip students with the skills required in the job market
• Greater emphasis on legal asymmetry
• In-depth legal knowledge and phraseology
• Documents representative of professional practice (as wide a
range as possible)
• Justification of translation solutions (with a reference to
reliable sources)
• Research resources
• Focus on the product rather than on the process
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Recommendations in legal translation
• Contextualise the translation task
 Analysis of the translation brief
 Analysis of the ST and TT
 Contrastive study between the source legal system and the target legal
system
 Collection and analysis of parallel texts (especially TT)
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
"Even if legal translators do not need to be equipped with a
jurist’s level of legal expertise, it is essential that they acquire
sufficient legal knowledge in order to situate the documents in
their legal and procedural context, as well as to grasp the legal
effects of original and target texts. In fact, legal translation
between national systems normally entails an exercise of
comparative law before any translation procedure can be
applied to culturally-marked segments on reasoned grounds (…)
The deeper the knowledge of legal subjects, the more confident
the translator can feel when dealing with legal content issues
during analysis and transfer stages of translation"
(Prieto 2011: 13)
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Research/Documentation plan
• Thematic documentation
 Acquire knowledge related to the specific field
 Understand the ST
 Sources: reference works, handbooks, encyclopaedias, specialised
journals, specialised monolingual and bilingual dictionaries…
• Terminological documentation
 Identify specialised terms in the ST and understand their meaning
 Find an equivalent term in the TL
 Sources: databases, glossaries, dictionaries…
• Cotextual and contextual documentation (parallel texts)
 Identify both the macrostructure and microstructure of ST and TT
 Sources: more problematic (authentic/private documents)
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
Recommendations in legal translation
• Be faithful to the original text (equivalence in terms of meaning, style and
discourse)
• Avoid abusing literal solutions, not only lexical (false friends) but also syntactical
and stylistic calques, and opt for other translation procedures which prove
adequate given the context, genre conventions and communicative purpose
– Adaptation
delito de guante blanco  (white glove crime ) white collar crime
– Amplification
magistrado  (magistrate ) senior judge / judge of a high court
– Generalisation
magistrado  (magistrate ) judge
– Modulation / Transposition
en su opinión…  he held that…
demora en la entrega  late delivery
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Future prospects
– Ever increasing activity
– Focus on the accreditation/training of legal translators and on
the quality of legal translations
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Future prospects
– DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and
translation in criminal proceedings
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Future prospects
– DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and
translation in criminal proceedings
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• Future prospects
– DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and
translation in criminal proceedings
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
– QUALETRA project (2012-2015)
• Improving the training of legal translators
• Assessing the quality of legal translations
• Monitoring legal translators’ work conditions
• Developing an accreditation system for legal translators
 Partnership including 9 EU universities, ECBA, CCBE and
EULITA
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
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Legal Translation and Translator Training
• REFERENCES
HURTADO ALBIR, Amparo (2007) Competence-based Curricula Design for
Training Translators. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 1 (2): 163-195.
KELLY, Dorothy (2002) Un modelo de competencia traductora: Bases para el
diseño curricular. Puentes 1: 9-20.
EMT Expert Group (2009) Competences for professional translators, experts in
multilingual and multimedia communication. Brussels: European
Commission.
PRIETO RAMOS, Fernando (2011) Developing Legal Translation Competence:
an Integrative Process-oriented Approach. Comparative Legilinguistics International Journal for Legal Communication 5: 7-21.
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Thank you for your attention
Francisco J. Vigier Moreno
francisco.vigier@uah.es