Bringing source text quality into the legal translation classroom: training translators to face defective source texts

ABSTRACT

Legal translators are routinely faced with defective source texts in their professional practice while being expected to produce effective translations despite such quality issues. Given the high-quality expectations required in legal translation, we have brought this professional reality into the classroom by outlining a quality control activity to allow legal translation trainees to systematise how they deal with defective Spanish administrative source texts. The proposal includes two steps: a translatability assessment and a pre-editing stage of defective administrative source texts. After empirically testing our proposal in the classroom, our initial findings suggest that this approach not only assists trainees to factor in poor source text quality when translating, but also to produce better translations.

KEYWORDS:

• Defective source texts
• legal translator training
• pre-editing
• quality control
• translatability assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This module is framed within the BA in Translation and Interpreting offered at the University of Granada (Spain). https://www.ugr.es/estudiantes/grados/grado-traduccion-interpretacion/traduccion-especializada-b-ingles-0 Accessed 28 December 2022

2. Unquestionably, other quality metrics taxonomies may be useful to do this kind of assessment (including various criteria and not necessarily just defect or error types). Other approaches may thus be compatible with this proposal.

3. For instance, spelling mistakes which are easily corrected may impact only on the ST, while spelling mistakes in STs that give rise to ambiguity may impact not only on the communicative effectiveness of the ST, but also on the communicative effectiveness of its subsequent translation.

4. https://www.extension.iastate.edu/documents/anr/likertscaleexamplesforsurveys.pdf. Accessed 28 December 2022.

5. We have not used the verb ‘to remove’ but the verb ‘to address’ in our definition.

6. While our proposal may assist trainees to produce more effective translations for other reasons besides avoiding the reproduction of STs’ defects, in this initial study we have chosen to focus on this specific benefit.