The impact of specialised translator training and professional experience on legal translation quality assurance: an empirical study of revision performance

ABSTRACT

The relevance of translation and law degrees as pathways to professional legal translation is the subject of persistent debate, but there is limited research on the relationship between legal translators’ backgrounds and competence levels in practice. This study compares the revision performance of several groups of institutional translators (44 in total) according to their academic backgrounds (legal translation specialisation, translation degrees with no legal specialisation, law degrees or other degrees) and legal translation experience (more or less than three years). The scores of justified, missing and over-corrections, among other indicators, corroborate the crucial impact of legal translation specialisation and subject-matter knowledge in ensuring legal translation quality, while experience can serve to partially fill certain training deficits. Qualified translators with a legal specialisation stood out as the most efficient revisers, followed by law graduates, translation graduates without a legal specialisation and other translators. A subsequent holistic assessment of the revised target text yielded results globally in line with the revision scores, as well as mixed perceptions of the target text as potential machine output. The findings support the added value of legal translator training, and are of relevance for translator recruitment and workflow management. They also challenge the rationale behind ISO 20771:2020 qualification requirements.

KEYWORDS:

• Legal translator training
• legal translation
• legal translation competence
• revision
• translation quality assurance
• ISO 20771:2020

Acknowledgments

Our gratitude goes to all the translation professionals who participated in the study, as well as to the institutional partners who cooperated in recruiting the participants.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. https://transius.unige.ch/letrint.

2. The first category concentrates on content and semantic nuance (e.g. unjustified omissions or additions and incorrect data), the second is about language mechanics and style (e.g. grammar, punctuation, spelling, register and fluency issues), and the last one focuses on conformity to domain or institutional conventions, consistency and decision-making adequacy from a functional perspective (e.g. terminological error or inconsistency, non-conformity to genre convention and inappropriate rendering considering the TT purpose). As for severity levels, a distinction is made between minor, significant, major and critical errors depending on their impact on content, comprehension, fluency, text function and usability. A short version of the ‘Framework for translation quality metrics’ can be accessed at: https://transius.unige.ch/en/research/letrint/quality-metrics. The rationale behind it falls beyond the scope of this study.

3. Contrary to what is inaccurately indicated in Annex B of ISO 20771:2020 (ISO 2020, 18–19), a law degree is not required as a general rule to translate legislation in the EU institutions or to translate legal texts in IGOs, but it is one of the qualifying degrees for recruitment (see Prieto Ramos and Guzmán 2022). The CJEU is the only EU institution where ‘lawyer-linguists’ (with a law degree) systematically work as legal translators, but they typically translate court documents, i.e. case-law and related texts, rather than legislation. In the other EU institutions, lawyer-linguists contribute to quality assurance and legal advising during the legislative process, but they do not generally translate. They are not ‘expected to have experience in translating and revising legislation’ to be recruited as asserted by the ISO standard (ISO 2020, 19).

4. These included some translators who were temporary staff without a permanent affiliation to a single organisation, but whose experience, often at several institutions, was extremely relevant.

5. Overall, on average, the participants of experience level 1 estimated that they had 12.6 years of experience in legal translation and 7.6 in ‘other-revision’ in this area, as opposed to 0.8 and 0.5 years, respectively, in the case of participants of experience level 2.

6. Including over-corrections or errors introduced (see Table 3).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a Consolidator Grant (157797).