Information-seeking behaviour of translation students at the University of Silesia during legal translation – an empirical investigation

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of an investigation into information-seeking behaviour of trainee translators, observed during translation of a legal text from English into Polish. The translator’s workspace has significantly changed over the last twenty years. Now translators have at their disposal not only traditional printed publications but also a variety of sources available in an electronic form. The study presented in this article aims to discover how this repertoire of available sources is utilized during a specific task – legal translation. The group under scrutiny are the students of a translation programme at the University of Silesia, Poland. The method of investigation combines observation and think-aloud protocol. The results obtained show, among others, the information most often looked-up in sources, the sources most often consulted, the level of satisfaction with source consultation, the reasons for non-satisfaction, and the problems commonly encountered during the search for information. The article ends with the list of characteristic information-seeking behaviours exhibited by the group in question.

KEYWORDS:

• Information seeking
• information mining
• translator’s instrumental competence
• translator’s resourcing skills
• legal translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Satisfaction with the consultation of a source means that the participant has obtained, in his subjective opinion, sufficient information to complete a given translation task.

2. Reaching information in available sources is only partial success. As Wilson (2000, 50) explains, ‘data [found in a source] may or may not be information depending upon the state of understanding of the information user’.

3. This list of features is naturally a generalisation. Legal language is a broad category encompassing numerous legal genres, each with its own individual characteristics. The discussion about the internal diversification of legal language can be found, among others, in Wróblewski (1948), Kurzon (1989), Zieliński (1999), Šarčević (2000), Cao (2007), and Bhatia (2008, 2010). For further reading about the features of legal language, I recommend Pieńkos (1999), Tiersma (1999), Šarčević (2000), Alcaraz and Hughes (2002), Jopek-Bosiacka (2006), and Cao (2007).

4. The examples of incongruent terms and their renditions in bilingual dictionaries can be found, among others, in Matulewska (2005), Biel (2006, 2010), Sycz-Opoń (2011), Kizińska (2011) and Gałuskina and Mazurkiewicz (2017).

5. In this article ‘Translator’ (capitalized) is understood as the participant in the experiment who is assigned the task of translation. The word ‘translator’ (not capitalized) is understood as the representative of the trade. The words ‘Recorder’ and ‘recorder’ should be understood analogically.

6. For those interested, the syllabuses can be obtained from the Institute of English (University of Silesia) upon request.

7. Phraseme is understood, following Arabski et al. (2009), as the superior category embracing all forms of fixed word combinations: collocations, idiomatic expressions and colligations.

8. One Observation protocol was rejected, because it contained notes that were too chaotic to produce reliable data.

9. Following Atkins and Varantola (1997), search is understood as the entire process of obtaining information related to a particular lexical item, while lookup is understood as a single consultation of a source. Therefore, several lookups may constitute a single search. The term source consultation is treated as synonymous to lookup.

10. Authored sources are understood as the sources which are published by identifiable institutions and whose authors and editors are recognized. Non-authored sources are understood as the sources whose authorship is unknown and which have not gone through the standard publishing process.