1. Francisco J. Vigier Moreno
Legal Translation and Translator Training
Francisco J. Vigier Moreno

2. Contents Legal Translation Legal Translator Training
Legal texts
Legal translation as a profession
Legal Translator Training
Legal translator competence
My experience in training legal translators

3. Legal Translation and Translator Training
Legal translation  translation of legal texts
What is a legal text?
A text dealing with legal concepts?
 A very extensive text typology
A text involved in legal proceedings?

4. Legal Translation and Translator Training
What is a legal text? (2)
A text orginated from a legal (communicative) situation?
 A very extensive text typology
A specialised text pertaining to the legal field?

5. 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

6. 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…

7. 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

8. Legal Translation and Translator Training

9. Legal Translation and Translator Training9

10. Legal Translation and Translator Training10

11. 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)

12. 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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14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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.

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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)

25. 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)

26. 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)

27. 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

28. 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

29. Legal Translation and Translator Training
Future prospects
DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings

30. Legal Translation and Translator Training
Future prospects
DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings

31. Legal Translation and Translator Training
Future prospects
DIRECTIVE 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings

32. Legal Translation and Translator Training
QUALETRA project ( )
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

33. Legal Translation and Translator Training

34. Legal Translation and Translator Training
REFERENCES
HURTADO ALBIR, Amparo (2007) Competence-based Curricula Design for Training Translators. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 1 (2):
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.

35. Francisco J. Vigier Moreno
Thank you for your attention
Francisco J. Vigier Moreno