Optimising resourcing skills to develop phraseological competence in legal translation: tasks and approaches

Abstract

Abstract Based on a previous case study on common translation errors made by trainee translators when dealing with phraseological units in legal translation (Huertas Barros and Buendía Castro 2018, Analysing phraseological units in legal translation: Evaluation of translation errors for the English-Spanish language pair. In S. Gozdz Roszkowski & G. Pontrandolfo (eds.), Phraseology in legal and institutional settings: A corpus-based interdisciplinary perspective (Law, Language and Communication). London & New York: Routledge), this paper proposes some activities and approaches to minimise these errors and hence enhance students’ phraseological competence in this field. To this end, the authors first provide a description of the most representative legal resources available for translators, particularly for the English-Spanish language pair. This is followed by a review of approaches that could develop students’ legal translation competence, particularly phraseological competence. For each type of error identified in the previous case study, the authors propose a set of research-based activities which could prevent such errors by maximising the use of legal resources. The emphasis is put on preliminary documentary research and effective use of corpora prior to the translation task. The authors propose an integrated approach combining task-based approaches with approaches based on critical discourse analysis, problem-solving and decision-making. While these tasks have been designed for a semi-specialised legal text pertaining to a subdomain of family law (i.e. adoption), they can be easily applied to any other subdomains of legal translation.