HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2024
Legal translation competence includes a high number of sub-competences that legal translation tra... more Legal translation competence includes a high number of sub-competences that legal translation trainees need to master. Therefore, trainers may have no time to tackle issues at the very micro level that are challenging not only for legal translation trainees, but sometimes even for professional translators. Although many such issues are identified in legal translation textbooks, the prevailing holistic approach to teaching legal translation may have led to such issues being sidelined in the legal translation classroom. Drawing on the author's experience as a legal translation trainer, this paper attempts to fill this vacuum and offer a systematic approach to addressing at least some of these phenomena. A selection of tricky terms will be presented, together with practical activities designed to raise trainees' awareness of such issues and teach them how to approach them confidently when translating from and to English. Four groups of terms are covered: false friends in general and legal language; vague terms such as good and reasonable; non-transparent terms where complex legal meaning is packed into a simple term (constructive, in lieu of), and enantiosemous terms (apparent, qualified). It is believed that when such phenomena are tackled in isolation, trainees may become better equipped to deal with them successfully the next time they encounter them in an English source text or to use them actively when translating into English.
This paper reflects upon the relevance of the ideas of Peter Newmark to legal translation. Even t... more This paper reflects upon the relevance of the ideas of Peter Newmark to legal translation. Even though legal translation was not the focus of Newmark's interest, he makes several references to legal translation in his writings, mostly in relation to authoritative statements, which is a broad category of texts introduced by Newmark and including legal and administrative texts. The paper provides a critical analysis of his ideas and puts them into today's legal translation studies context. The second part of the paper includes a brief and non-exhaustive overview of Newmark's concepts that have been echoed in legal translation studies, namely his list of translation techniques, and his dichotomy of semantic and communicative translation.
International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse, 2024
Since plain language is a reality of today's legal writing, though admittedly not as widespread a... more Since plain language is a reality of today's legal writing, though admittedly not as widespread as it could be, it should also be addressed in legal translation courses going beyond a mere mention of the plain language movement and its contrasting with legalese. Therefore, this paper will discuss why and how legal translation trainees should be introduced to the principles of plain language in a systematic way, especially with reference to English. The use of plain language may involve two dilemmas for legal translation trainees. First, when asked to translate an English legal document written in plain language, they may need to decide whether to keep the style in the translation into a language in which plain legal documents may be less widespread. Second, when translating into English trainees may face a dilemma whether to apply the principles of plain language or seek inspiration from parallel documents which may be written in legalese rather than plain language. The second dilemma is especially acute when translating to English as a foreign language. It is believed that any dilemma is easier to tackle when the person facing it is equipped with a systematic decision-making approach. Accordingly, the paper will present a series of activities to raise trainees' awareness of the principles of plain language, the use of relevant resources, and the compliance with such principles in legal drafting, including the grey zone of "false legalese", as well as activities to be able to make informed and reasoned decisions on transferring plain language features from English into other languages, as well as on applying plain language principles when translating legal documents into English. The exercises will be based on authentic materials and adaptable to different language pairs involving English as well as different teaching contexts.
The paper describes the state of legal interpreting training in the Czech Republic, which, as it ... more The paper describes the state of legal interpreting training in the Czech Republic, which, as it currently stands, focuses on legal terminology rather than specific interpreting techniques. Against this background of the existing training opportunities, the paper presents a pilot course on legal interpreting, including court interpreting, for BA and MA students of English for Translators and Interpreters at Palacký University Olomouc. It describes the design of the course, its content and the methodology applied. Specifically, it describes the different settings addressed in the courses and the materials and activities used to train interpreters for these settings, including a mock trial. Finally, the paper also discusses the challenges and potential room for further development.
This paper presents a retrospective review of patterns found in cases of homicides by sharp force... more This paper presents a retrospective review of patterns found in cases of homicides by sharp force over a 13-year period at the Department of Forensic Pathology of the Ostrava University Hospital, Czech Republic. The review summarizes all frequently discussed aspects of such cases including the number and localization of injuries, the presence of defensive wounds, the type of the offending weapon, the cause of death, the place of death, victims’ and perpetrators’ profiles, their relationship, or toxicological findings. Furthermore, special attention was paid to the evaluation of any accompanying blunt force trauma that may be indicative of an escalation of the assault. The set of data was statistically analyzed. Even though most of the results of this review are consistent with available published studies, noteworthy differences have emerged in some aspects such as the sex and age of the victims, the relationship between the number of injuries suffered and the victims’ sex, or the se...
This paper addresses the notion of legal genres and text types from a classroom perspective. It p... more This paper addresses the notion of legal genres and text types from a classroom perspective. It presents several classifications of legal texts developed for legal translation (training) purposes and a critical reflextion thereof. Drawing on the classifications, the paper discusses what the rationale behind text selection in legal translation training should be, and why certain texts are more suitable than others in this respect, depending on the length and level of training. This is followed by a series of exercises designed to raise register and genre awareness in legal translation trainees. The exercises focus on the (a)symmetry of legal genres across languages and legal systems as well as the macrostructure of certain genres.
Traducción e Interpretación especializadas en ámbito panhispánico, 2023
Son numerosos los modelos de competencia para la traducción jurídica que hacen referencia al cono... more Son numerosos los modelos de competencia para la traducción jurídica que hacen referencia al conocimiento de los géneros jurídicos dentro de la subcompetencia textual (p. ej. Prieto Ramos 2011; Soriano Barabino 2018). Tal conocimiento incluye también la comprensión de la superestructura y macroestructura de los géneros (Valderrey 2017). Esto implica que es un aspecto de la labor de los traductores jurídicos que merece ser abordado en la clase de traducción jurídica, como demuestran trabajos relativos a una variedad de géneros textuales y combinaciones lingüísticas (Mayoral Asensio 2007; Barceló Martínez 2009; Holl y Elena 2015). Sin embargo, las propuestas para tratar el tema en el aula son casi inexistentes, aún más para la combinación lingüística del español y el checo. Con este panorama, el presente artículo adoptará un enfoque didáctico socio-constructivista y presentará una propuesta para abordar la macroestructura de los géneros jurídicos del derecho español más traducidos, entre ellos, sentencias, contratos y escrituras notariales, y para su exposición a los estudiantes en una clase de traducción jurídica del español al checo. Como parte del artículo, se presentarán tareas formativas orientadas a sensibilizar a los estudiantes sobre los problemas implicados, aprender estrategias para solucionar los casos de asimetría y reflexionar sobre el empleo adecuado de estas estrategias (cf. Martínez-Carrasco 2019).
Instrumentalising Foreign Language Pedagogy in Translator and Interpreter Training: Methods, goals and perspectives, 2023
This chapter instrumentalises an area of foreign language teaching that is often neglected in tra... more This chapter instrumentalises an area of foreign language teaching that is often neglected in translation programmes’ curricula, namely the contrastive grammar of specialised languages. More specifically, this chapter addresses the incorporation of the contrastive grammar of legal English and Czech into an English grammar classroom. First, the rationale behind such an approach is presented with reference to the existing legal translation competence models and curricular design. Second, a number of linguistic phenomena encountered in English legal texts, and possibly neglected in English language classes for translators, are discussed from a socio-constructivist training perspective, and a series of exercises is presented that may be used, or adapted for use, by the instructors of such courses to help them cover these specific aspects of English grammar.
Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language... more Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language is not devoid of it. In fact, legal language involves cases of syntactical synonymy and lexical synonymy as well as cases of absolute and partial synonymy. Therefore synonymy must be addressed in a legal translation classroom to make trainees aware of all the issues that it may involve, as well as of the fact that terms that may be perceived as synonymous by laypeople are not actually synonymous to lawyers (e.g. murder, homicide, manslaughter). What also needs to be addressed in a legal translation classroom are situations of near-synonyms, whose usage is governed by collocational or contextual restrictions (e.g. breach, violate, infringe) and sometimes involves slight nuances in meaning (e.g. liability v. responsibility, or unlawful, illegal, illicit, etc.). This article introduces a step-by-step approach designed to introduce legal translation trainees to a variety of issues related t...
Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language... more Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language is not devoid of it. In fact, legal language involves cases of syntactical synonymy and lexical synonymy as well as cases of absolute and partial synonymy. Therefore synonymy must be addressed in a legal translation classroom to make trainees aware of all the issues that it may involve, as well as of the fact that terms that may be perceived as synonymous by laypeople are not actually synonymous to lawyers (e.g. murder, homicide, manslaughter). What also needs to be addressed in a legal translation classroom are situations of near-synonyms, whose usage is governed by collocational or contextual restrictions (e.g. breach, violate, infringe) and sometimes involves slight nuances in meaning (e.g. liability v. responsibility, or unlawful, illegal, illicit, etc.). This article introduces a step-by-step approach designed to introduce legal translation trainees to a variety of issues related to (non-)synonymy in legal language, and presents a series of exercises that have been prepared to this end in line with the scaffolding approach. Although the exercises are designed for the English-Czech language pair, they are easily transferable to any teaching context involving English.
Teaching Translation vs. Training Translators, 2022
This paper discusses the role of comparative law in legal translation and its application into th... more This paper discusses the role of comparative law in legal translation and its application into the legal translation classroom. The focus is placed on micro-comparison of legal concepts and institutions and on teaching comparative conceptual analysis. Previous studies have shown that one of the major issues for legal translation trainees when asked to perform an analysis is the identi cation of accidental and essential features, and thus determining the equivalence between a source language concept and a target language concept. Therefore, a series of exercises is presented, using company law institutions and terms in English and Czech, the aim of which is to rst raise trainees awareness of the need for comparative conceptual analysis, and then introduce them to how the analysis should be performed and make them use it in practice to overcome terminological asymmetry.
It is a well-acknowledged fact in legal translation studies that when searching for terminologica... more It is a well-acknowledged fact in legal translation studies that when searching for terminological equivalents, translators should make use of comparative conceptual analysis (e.g. Sandrini 1996; Chromá 2014; Engberg 2015). Thus, legal translation trainees should be equipped with the necessary tools to carry out such analysis, but the question remains: are they? This paper is a follow-up to a study published in 2017 (Klabal, Knap-Dlouhá and Kubánek 2017), where modified think aloud protocols were used to explore the following research question: to what degree are university students doing a course in legal and economic translation able to apply the methods of comparative conceptual analysis to translation of terms not accounted for sufficiently in legal dictionaries or terms with no straightforward equivalents. The results showed that major issues involve non-linearity of the analysis carried out and insufficient use of the resources available. The present study involves a different group of 29 BA students of the same course two years later, who were assigned the same task. As the retrospective protocols fail to simulate real-life conditions, this study uses screen recording and keystroke logging to track the processes leading to the identification of the conceptual equivalent in a more detailed and less subject-dependent manner. The results suggest that the steps most challenging for students include identification of relevant (essential) features defining the source and target language concepts, comparison of these features and selection, or creation, of an equivalent term reflecting the results of the analysis. Students also frequently show Google-driven searching, which influences the order of the steps performed in their analyses and the sources used. To address these challenges, translation training should include a range of tailor-made exercises focusing on the critical steps of the analysis as well as on improving web searching skills.
HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2024
Legal translation competence includes a high number of sub-competences that legal translation tra... more Legal translation competence includes a high number of sub-competences that legal translation trainees need to master. Therefore, trainers may have no time to tackle issues at the very micro level that are challenging not only for legal translation trainees, but sometimes even for professional translators. Although many such issues are identified in legal translation textbooks, the prevailing holistic approach to teaching legal translation may have led to such issues being sidelined in the legal translation classroom. Drawing on the author's experience as a legal translation trainer, this paper attempts to fill this vacuum and offer a systematic approach to addressing at least some of these phenomena. A selection of tricky terms will be presented, together with practical activities designed to raise trainees' awareness of such issues and teach them how to approach them confidently when translating from and to English. Four groups of terms are covered: false friends in general and legal language; vague terms such as good and reasonable; non-transparent terms where complex legal meaning is packed into a simple term (constructive, in lieu of), and enantiosemous terms (apparent, qualified). It is believed that when such phenomena are tackled in isolation, trainees may become better equipped to deal with them successfully the next time they encounter them in an English source text or to use them actively when translating into English.
This paper reflects upon the relevance of the ideas of Peter Newmark to legal translation. Even t... more This paper reflects upon the relevance of the ideas of Peter Newmark to legal translation. Even though legal translation was not the focus of Newmark's interest, he makes several references to legal translation in his writings, mostly in relation to authoritative statements, which is a broad category of texts introduced by Newmark and including legal and administrative texts. The paper provides a critical analysis of his ideas and puts them into today's legal translation studies context. The second part of the paper includes a brief and non-exhaustive overview of Newmark's concepts that have been echoed in legal translation studies, namely his list of translation techniques, and his dichotomy of semantic and communicative translation.
International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse, 2024
Since plain language is a reality of today's legal writing, though admittedly not as widespread a... more Since plain language is a reality of today's legal writing, though admittedly not as widespread as it could be, it should also be addressed in legal translation courses going beyond a mere mention of the plain language movement and its contrasting with legalese. Therefore, this paper will discuss why and how legal translation trainees should be introduced to the principles of plain language in a systematic way, especially with reference to English. The use of plain language may involve two dilemmas for legal translation trainees. First, when asked to translate an English legal document written in plain language, they may need to decide whether to keep the style in the translation into a language in which plain legal documents may be less widespread. Second, when translating into English trainees may face a dilemma whether to apply the principles of plain language or seek inspiration from parallel documents which may be written in legalese rather than plain language. The second dilemma is especially acute when translating to English as a foreign language. It is believed that any dilemma is easier to tackle when the person facing it is equipped with a systematic decision-making approach. Accordingly, the paper will present a series of activities to raise trainees' awareness of the principles of plain language, the use of relevant resources, and the compliance with such principles in legal drafting, including the grey zone of "false legalese", as well as activities to be able to make informed and reasoned decisions on transferring plain language features from English into other languages, as well as on applying plain language principles when translating legal documents into English. The exercises will be based on authentic materials and adaptable to different language pairs involving English as well as different teaching contexts.
The paper describes the state of legal interpreting training in the Czech Republic, which, as it ... more The paper describes the state of legal interpreting training in the Czech Republic, which, as it currently stands, focuses on legal terminology rather than specific interpreting techniques. Against this background of the existing training opportunities, the paper presents a pilot course on legal interpreting, including court interpreting, for BA and MA students of English for Translators and Interpreters at Palacký University Olomouc. It describes the design of the course, its content and the methodology applied. Specifically, it describes the different settings addressed in the courses and the materials and activities used to train interpreters for these settings, including a mock trial. Finally, the paper also discusses the challenges and potential room for further development.
This paper presents a retrospective review of patterns found in cases of homicides by sharp force... more This paper presents a retrospective review of patterns found in cases of homicides by sharp force over a 13-year period at the Department of Forensic Pathology of the Ostrava University Hospital, Czech Republic. The review summarizes all frequently discussed aspects of such cases including the number and localization of injuries, the presence of defensive wounds, the type of the offending weapon, the cause of death, the place of death, victims’ and perpetrators’ profiles, their relationship, or toxicological findings. Furthermore, special attention was paid to the evaluation of any accompanying blunt force trauma that may be indicative of an escalation of the assault. The set of data was statistically analyzed. Even though most of the results of this review are consistent with available published studies, noteworthy differences have emerged in some aspects such as the sex and age of the victims, the relationship between the number of injuries suffered and the victims’ sex, or the se...
This paper addresses the notion of legal genres and text types from a classroom perspective. It p... more This paper addresses the notion of legal genres and text types from a classroom perspective. It presents several classifications of legal texts developed for legal translation (training) purposes and a critical reflextion thereof. Drawing on the classifications, the paper discusses what the rationale behind text selection in legal translation training should be, and why certain texts are more suitable than others in this respect, depending on the length and level of training. This is followed by a series of exercises designed to raise register and genre awareness in legal translation trainees. The exercises focus on the (a)symmetry of legal genres across languages and legal systems as well as the macrostructure of certain genres.
Traducción e Interpretación especializadas en ámbito panhispánico, 2023
Son numerosos los modelos de competencia para la traducción jurídica que hacen referencia al cono... more Son numerosos los modelos de competencia para la traducción jurídica que hacen referencia al conocimiento de los géneros jurídicos dentro de la subcompetencia textual (p. ej. Prieto Ramos 2011; Soriano Barabino 2018). Tal conocimiento incluye también la comprensión de la superestructura y macroestructura de los géneros (Valderrey 2017). Esto implica que es un aspecto de la labor de los traductores jurídicos que merece ser abordado en la clase de traducción jurídica, como demuestran trabajos relativos a una variedad de géneros textuales y combinaciones lingüísticas (Mayoral Asensio 2007; Barceló Martínez 2009; Holl y Elena 2015). Sin embargo, las propuestas para tratar el tema en el aula son casi inexistentes, aún más para la combinación lingüística del español y el checo. Con este panorama, el presente artículo adoptará un enfoque didáctico socio-constructivista y presentará una propuesta para abordar la macroestructura de los géneros jurídicos del derecho español más traducidos, entre ellos, sentencias, contratos y escrituras notariales, y para su exposición a los estudiantes en una clase de traducción jurídica del español al checo. Como parte del artículo, se presentarán tareas formativas orientadas a sensibilizar a los estudiantes sobre los problemas implicados, aprender estrategias para solucionar los casos de asimetría y reflexionar sobre el empleo adecuado de estas estrategias (cf. Martínez-Carrasco 2019).
Instrumentalising Foreign Language Pedagogy in Translator and Interpreter Training: Methods, goals and perspectives, 2023
This chapter instrumentalises an area of foreign language teaching that is often neglected in tra... more This chapter instrumentalises an area of foreign language teaching that is often neglected in translation programmes’ curricula, namely the contrastive grammar of specialised languages. More specifically, this chapter addresses the incorporation of the contrastive grammar of legal English and Czech into an English grammar classroom. First, the rationale behind such an approach is presented with reference to the existing legal translation competence models and curricular design. Second, a number of linguistic phenomena encountered in English legal texts, and possibly neglected in English language classes for translators, are discussed from a socio-constructivist training perspective, and a series of exercises is presented that may be used, or adapted for use, by the instructors of such courses to help them cover these specific aspects of English grammar.
Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language... more Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language is not devoid of it. In fact, legal language involves cases of syntactical synonymy and lexical synonymy as well as cases of absolute and partial synonymy. Therefore synonymy must be addressed in a legal translation classroom to make trainees aware of all the issues that it may involve, as well as of the fact that terms that may be perceived as synonymous by laypeople are not actually synonymous to lawyers (e.g. murder, homicide, manslaughter). What also needs to be addressed in a legal translation classroom are situations of near-synonyms, whose usage is governed by collocational or contextual restrictions (e.g. breach, violate, infringe) and sometimes involves slight nuances in meaning (e.g. liability v. responsibility, or unlawful, illegal, illicit, etc.). This article introduces a step-by-step approach designed to introduce legal translation trainees to a variety of issues related t...
Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language... more Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language is not devoid of it. In fact, legal language involves cases of syntactical synonymy and lexical synonymy as well as cases of absolute and partial synonymy. Therefore synonymy must be addressed in a legal translation classroom to make trainees aware of all the issues that it may involve, as well as of the fact that terms that may be perceived as synonymous by laypeople are not actually synonymous to lawyers (e.g. murder, homicide, manslaughter). What also needs to be addressed in a legal translation classroom are situations of near-synonyms, whose usage is governed by collocational or contextual restrictions (e.g. breach, violate, infringe) and sometimes involves slight nuances in meaning (e.g. liability v. responsibility, or unlawful, illegal, illicit, etc.). This article introduces a step-by-step approach designed to introduce legal translation trainees to a variety of issues related to (non-)synonymy in legal language, and presents a series of exercises that have been prepared to this end in line with the scaffolding approach. Although the exercises are designed for the English-Czech language pair, they are easily transferable to any teaching context involving English.
Teaching Translation vs. Training Translators, 2022
This paper discusses the role of comparative law in legal translation and its application into th... more This paper discusses the role of comparative law in legal translation and its application into the legal translation classroom. The focus is placed on micro-comparison of legal concepts and institutions and on teaching comparative conceptual analysis. Previous studies have shown that one of the major issues for legal translation trainees when asked to perform an analysis is the identi cation of accidental and essential features, and thus determining the equivalence between a source language concept and a target language concept. Therefore, a series of exercises is presented, using company law institutions and terms in English and Czech, the aim of which is to rst raise trainees awareness of the need for comparative conceptual analysis, and then introduce them to how the analysis should be performed and make them use it in practice to overcome terminological asymmetry.
It is a well-acknowledged fact in legal translation studies that when searching for terminologica... more It is a well-acknowledged fact in legal translation studies that when searching for terminological equivalents, translators should make use of comparative conceptual analysis (e.g. Sandrini 1996; Chromá 2014; Engberg 2015). Thus, legal translation trainees should be equipped with the necessary tools to carry out such analysis, but the question remains: are they? This paper is a follow-up to a study published in 2017 (Klabal, Knap-Dlouhá and Kubánek 2017), where modified think aloud protocols were used to explore the following research question: to what degree are university students doing a course in legal and economic translation able to apply the methods of comparative conceptual analysis to translation of terms not accounted for sufficiently in legal dictionaries or terms with no straightforward equivalents. The results showed that major issues involve non-linearity of the analysis carried out and insufficient use of the resources available. The present study involves a different group of 29 BA students of the same course two years later, who were assigned the same task. As the retrospective protocols fail to simulate real-life conditions, this study uses screen recording and keystroke logging to track the processes leading to the identification of the conceptual equivalent in a more detailed and less subject-dependent manner. The results suggest that the steps most challenging for students include identification of relevant (essential) features defining the source and target language concepts, comparison of these features and selection, or creation, of an equivalent term reflecting the results of the analysis. Students also frequently show Google-driven searching, which influences the order of the steps performed in their analyses and the sources used. To address these challenges, translation training should include a range of tailor-made exercises focusing on the critical steps of the analysis as well as on improving web searching skills.
Monografie přináší ucelený pohled na problematiku hodnocení kvality překladu, na různé aspekty ho... more Monografie přináší ucelený pohled na problematiku hodnocení kvality překladu, na různé aspekty hodnocení a jejich návaznost na překladatelský proces. První část „Teoretická východiska“ představuje základní teoretické koncepty, mapuje tradiční i současné přístupy k hodnocení překladu a vytváří rámec pro empirickou část „Přístupy a aplikace“. Ta zahrnuje šest samostatných studií, jejichž cílem je popsat a zkoumat specifické situace hodnocení kvality překladu (různé oblasti hodnocení, fáze překladatelského procesu, typy textů a módy překladu).
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