Corpus-based Activities in Legal Translator Training

Abstract

Driven by increasingly demanding and competitive market pressures, translation professionals have turned to computer-assisted tools and other specialized electronic resources to improve their productivity without compromising the quality of their output. This paper discusses the usefulness of corpus-driven activities and electronic corpus-based tools for the purposes of legal translator training. It begins with an overview of legal translation as an idiosyncratic field of specialized mediation and a survey of previous corpus-based approaches to translator training. A number of discourse effects which characterize legal texts are then defined – universalization, neutralization and defamiliarization. Drawing on relevant examples, the author argues that corpus-based legal translator training is particularly helpful for trainees to identify the textual manifestations of these effects and to decide how they should be transferred across languages and legal systems. Within this framework, a range of specific corpus-driven activities are proposed and this pedagogical approach is shown to foster the students’ active involvement in the management of their own learning. Whilst the activities outlined here are restricted to the domain of legal texts, this paper aims to inspire fellow trainers to explore the advantages of corpus-based teaching across different translation fields and trainee backgrounds.