Step-by-step approach to teaching legal translation: the case of understanding English legal texts

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is based within the framework of step-by-step approach to teaching legal translation. The underlying philosophy behind this approach is that when specific aspects of legal translations are tackled in isolation and trainees become aware of the pitfalls involved and the possible solutions, this helps them in further training as well as in their professional practice. Drawing on this assumption, this paper introduces a case study dealing with understanding and interpretation of English legal texts from the classroom perspective. The paper presents a number of problems that pose difficulties to trainees and proposes exercises to help them overcome such problems in a systematic way. Although this paper uses Czech as a target language, the exercises can be adapted to teach legal translation from English into other target languages. The issues have been selected based on the author’s experience with addressing recurring problems faced by legal translation trainees. Such issues include understanding complex sentences showing all-inclusiveness and syntactic discontinuities, legal cross-referencing expressions (e.g. subject to and without prejudice to) or conjunctions whose meaning may not be transparent (e.g. provided, however, that).