Legal and institutional translator competence: developments and training implications

ABSTRACT

As in other areas of translation practice and translator education, technological advances are having a considerable impact on working processes and training in legal and institutional translation. This trend has contributed to research on translator competence gaining new significance and urgency with a view to adapting curricula and training approaches to the latest professional developments in the field. This introduction to a special issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer on competence in legal and institutional translation reviews selected contributions that examine the integral components of legal and institutional translator competence, propose strategies to help trainees develop this competence, or analyse the impact of machine translation use and specialised training on translator competence and performance in today’s increasingly automated environments. The link between professional practice, research and the classroom is reflected in the questions posed and the enlightening responses provided in the form of valuable empirical data, examples and ideas for trainers and trainees. These insights also illustrate the relevance of a diversity of perspectives and research methods, and support a renewed sense of awareness of the critical value of specialised training itself in legal and institutional translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Legal and institutional translator competence
• legal and institutional translation
• machine translation
• post-editing
• translation quality assurance

1. Why focus on legal and institutional translator competence?

The competence-based approach to translator training has gained significant ground in higher education especially since the launch of the Bologna Process, which promoted the convergence of European educational systems through the development of comparable competences across programmes. Competence is also a central pillar in the broader European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning (EQF) established in 2008¹ and revised in 2017.²

As in other areas of translator education, competence development is at the centre of legal and institutional translator training. Curriculum and syllabus design, learning outcomes and assessment, course implementation and didactic innovations, among other aspects, all revolve around the dynamic concept of competence, its various components and achievement levels. Furthering our knowledge of what makes a competent translator and how to develop such competence is a persistent priority for trainers, trainees, researchers and practitioners in the field, as it is presumed that translation expertise is a condition to ensure translation quality.

The complexity and implications of translating legal texts support the widespread perception of legal translation as an area that requires high quality and specialised human competence. This perception is linked to the culture-bound dimensions and effects of legal texts, the specific methodologies applied to deal with conceptual incongruities between legal systems and the risks of producing inaccurate translations in this field. Like law, legal translation spans a vast scope, including a myriad of jurisdictions, branches of law, subjects and professional contexts. It accounts for a prominent segment of the private translation sector (see e.g. ELIS 2024, 30), and of translation at multilingual institutions, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Legal (or legal and administrative) translation is not only the main specialisation found across these institutions, but also a suitable paradigm for institutional translation practice more broadly, given the prevailing need for accuracy and consistency with the applicable legal frameworks, organisation-specific conventions and previous texts of law- and policy-making and implementation (Prieto Ramos 2020a; Prieto Ramos and Guzmán 2021). In turn, this explains the common use of the binomial ‘legal and institutional translation’, which we will also employ in this special issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer on ‘Competence in legal and institutional translation: training challenges and innovations’.

It is also somehow unsurprising that legal translation has developed a strong identity within Translation Studies, and research in Legal Translation Studies (LTS) has grown significantly in the past few decades (for a historical overview, see Prieto Ramos 2014a). While distinctive legal terminology, legal comparative analysis and legal genres have remained central subjects in LTS, legal translator competence (LTC)³ and legal translator training have also attracted increasing attention (see Section 2 and e.g. Biel 2011; Cao 2014; Monzó Nebot 2015; Way 2012, 2014). LTC and qualification requirements are also addressed in the first ISO standard devoted to a domain specialisation in translation, ISO 20771:2020 (Legal translation – Requirements).

Like in other areas of translation practice and translator education, technological advances are having a significant impact on working processes and training in legal and institutional translation. This trend has contributed to research on translator competence gaining new relevance and urgency with a view to adapting curricula and training approaches to the latest professional developments in the field. To what extent are human-machine interactions affecting the way competence is developed and applied in legal and institutional translation? Which LTC components are becoming more or less critical to ensure translation quality in increasingly automated environments? How can these components be further enhanced in the classroom? What are the implications for trainers and trainees, and the value of specialised training itself to achieve expert performance?

These are some of the questions examined in this special issue by a broad spectrum of trainers and researchers working in the area of legal and institutional translation. Their selected papers include two key studies of the LETRINT project on legal and institutional translation⁴ led by this guest editor, as well as didactic proposals and research initially presented at the 2022 Transius International Conference on Legal and Institutional Translation at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. As will be outlined below, their contributions are complementary, as they present a diversity of aspects of legal or institutional translator competence, training approaches and pedagogical illustrations from various programmes, and they showcase the relevance of multiple perspectives and research methods, including empirical studies, corpus analyses, interviews, surveys and focus groups.

2. What are the main components of LTC to be developed in training?

The first paper of the special issue is a natural continuation of this introduction in that it reviews the major existing multi-componential models of translation competence in legal translation, and it presents how the first descriptor of its kind in the field (Prieto Ramos 2011) has been updated, expanded and validated to integrate new technological advances and the broader scope of institutional translation. The adaptation process was based on the triangulation of data from multiple sources, including interviews, institutional text corpora and job descriptors. The revised descriptor was validated through a survey of 474 translation professionals from 24 international organisations.

The results support the integration of post-editing into the (increasingly diversified) core strategic or methodological sub-competence, which remains at the heart of today’s versatile ‘translator competence’, encompassing much more than translation skills stricto sensu. The findings also corroborate the widespread perception that, despite the growing importance of instrumental (or technological) competence since the advent of neural machine translation (NMT) in particular, three core competences remain key to ensuring translation quality: language or communicative and textual competence, strategic or methodological competence, and thematic and cultural competence (particularly so for legal translation in the case of the latter).

As for variations of perceptions based on academic background and experience, respondents who had received more tailored training, including a translation degree and law or legal translation training, and those with more experience in institutional translation showed higher awareness of the relevance of all the sub-competences, especially the core language, strategic and thematic competences, and even more so for translating texts of a legal or administrative nature. In turn, it is presumed that this greater awareness is a condition for expert levels of translation performance (see last paper and Section 4). Overall, the findings point to the persistent need to strengthen the focus of training on what is required to achieve excellence in specialised translation, including language and methodological skills and subject matter knowledge, in a landscape of growing human-machine interaction.

In their contribution, Marie-Hélène Girard and Noelle Peach illustrate how competence descriptors are a critical yardstick for curriculum design and implementation, as they explain how the same multi-componential approach to LTC examined in the first paper was applied for the development of a graduate diploma in legal translation (GDLT) at McGill University. The authors applied constructive alignment theory (Biggs and Tang 2011) to associate the intended learning outcomes of each course to the broader programme-level learning outcomes, which were established in line with the abovementioned LTC descriptor.

From a pedagogical perspective, the weight assigned in the GDLT to each sub-competence varies through the different stages of the learning process, but strategic or methodological competence is prioritised in light of its critical relevance and distinctive nature in legal translation. However, the initial emphasis is on communicative and textual competence and thematic and cultural competence in order to build the foundations for legal translation practice. In this endeavour, as also suggested in the approach adopted (Prieto Ramos 2011, 9), the students’ initial competence gaps called for specific corrective actions depending on their legal or language backgrounds, including through the development of legal knowledge (thematic and cultural competence) in legal translation courses.

Overall, McGill’s experience attests to the relevance of the adopted integrative process-oriented approach to LTC as a roadmap to develop legal translation programmes and courses. It also illustrates the benefits of associating specific competences with learning outcomes and activities, and ultimately also training materials and assessment methods, in a structured way for a scaffolded delivery, considering the background of trainees and the programme goals. The enriched approach can serve not only to evaluate and refine the programme, but also to inspire similar tailoring processes in other training contexts.

The third contribution of this first part, by Márta Lesznyák, Mária Bakti and Eszter Sermann, focuses on the role of two of the core competences, language and thematic competences, in ensuring legal translation quality in two different conditions, from-scratch translation and NMT post-editing (PE). Two groups of second-year MA translation students with comparable backgrounds translated part of a copyright agreement from English into Hungarian, one group without NMT and another one post-editing NMT output.

The final product quality and the average time devoted to the exercise were similar in each group. Thematic competence, which was assessed through a multiple-choice test, did not have a differential impact on translation quality in any of the groups, although the authors admit the difficulties to isolate the effects of legal knowledge and the fact that the narrow focus of the text was insufficient to generalise conclusions in this regard. However, correlations were found between source language test scores and translation performance, particularly in the case of the PE group, including a higher number of terminology errors. These findings are in line with previous studies on the similarities between PE and other translational skills (e.g. Daems et al. 2017), and on the special role of reading in PE as hypothesised by Do Carmo and Moorkens (2020). The study also aligns with the first two papers of the special issue in highlighting the relevance of enhancing core competence components, such as language proficiency, from an early stage of the training process, and even more so in times of increasing automation.

3. What kinds of activities can help trainees develop LTC?

The next three articles outline proposals to help trainees develop some of the core competences referenced above, such as language and strategic competences. In his contribution, Ondřej Klabal focuses on the difficulties of interpreting and understanding legal texts in English for translation purposes, and proposes a series of exercises to make trainees aware of such issues and develop strategies to address them step-by-step in the English-Czech translation classroom. He combines individual exercises with work in pairs or groups, including multiple examples and questionnaires designed to analyse, among other aspects, complex syntactic structures, cross-referencing devices, recurrent conjunctions, legal provisions and polysemous expressions. The texts selected illustrate not only authentic uses of English in common law jurisdictions, but also uses of English as a lingua franca by non-native drafters.

Also in connection with language competence and text analysis, Elena Ruiz Cortés concentrates on how to deal with defective source texts by examining the case of five illustrative documents from the Spanish Civil Registry to be translated into English as part of an L2 translation course. The proposal includes a translatability assessment and an editing exercise to improve the quality of the source text (e.g. in terms of clarity and readability) presuming that translators’ intervention is possible in real practice, before translating the texts. The proposed activities were aimed at reinforcing trainees’ analytical and editing skills in their mother tongue, as well as their strategic competence for reformulation into the target language (L2 in this case). Indeed, the trainees’ feedback suggests that they became more aware of the typical issues and implications of defective Civil Registry texts, which, in turn, helped them to address such issues more efficiently in the translation process.

Finally, Mariana Orozco Jutorán delves into one of the most distinctive features of legal translator training: the strategic or methodological competence needed to translate legal culture-bound terms that generate incongruities between legal systems. As stressed by the author, the comparative legal analysis required in such cases of legal asymmetry also calls for adequate thematic and cultural or intercultural competence. The article describes a didactic sequence that draws on a functionalist approach to decision-making (Nord 1997; Prieto Ramos 2014b) as the basis to determine the overall translation adequacy strategy and the micro-level communicative priorities, and accordingly apply the most suitable translation technique in each context. These techniques are associated to several ‘levels of intervention’ depending on the degree of functional adaptation required in reformulations.

The didactic sequence, which was implemented with 25 MA students of a legal translation course at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, includes four units composed of various task-based activities to support trainees in acquiring the relevant methodological competence, from the macrotextual analysis to the application of techniques at the microtextual level, as well as formative and summative assessment. According to a follow-up survey and focus group, the activities proved effective, thus providing another example of how to build the foundations for subsequent good professional practice through systematic decision-making.

4. What are the implications of MT use for legal and institutional translator training and the value of specialised training itself in LTC development?

Although legal translation has been traditionally perceived as less suited for MT than other areas due to the legal intricacies and risks involved in translating legal texts, the use of MT systems has also permeated this field, including institutional translation workflows. Research thus far has revealed varying results of MT performance depending on the system employed, the language pairs and the texts at hand.

In his contribution, Jeffrey Killman takes stock of these developments in a very comprehensive review of studies about the use of MT in legal and institutional translation. This review is conceived as a necessary step towards developing critical awareness of the potential strengths and weaknesses of MT, and the opportunities and threats of using it in professional practice. A SWOT analysis is proposed from this perspective to enhance domain-specific MT literacy as an essential component of instrumental competence in the legal translation classroom. The proposed analysis is also intended to foster trainees’ understanding of legal translation challenges and quality issues commonly addressed in PE work. This SWOT framework can be extremely useful as a starting point to consider the potential gains and risks of integrating MT suggestions when conducting a particular translation assignment, beyond training contexts.

In the following article, Carla Quinci explores the impact of MT use and legal translation training on trainees’ information mining skills as part of a broader simulated longitudinal empirical study, LeMaTTT (‘Legal Machine Translation in Translator Training’). The paper focuses on the time devoted and the resources used in a legal translation task (the English-Italian translation of a power of attorney) by two cohorts of 20 MA students, one composed of final-year trainees with training in legal translation and basic MT literacy, and another one of first-year trainees with no or very limited experience of legal translation and PE. Each group was divided into two sub-groups depending on whether they would post-edit MT output or translate from scratch.

The group of final-year participants registered a more efficient use of time and resources, which points to the added value of specialised training to build knowledge of relevant and reliable sources for legal translation. This is in line with similar patterns found among translation professionals in institutional settings in particular (Prieto Ramos 2020b). As for the fluctuations associated to MT use, trainees translating from scratch understandably devoted more time to drafting than to revision as compared to the PE sub-groups. The latter focused more on terminological resources as opposed to a wider range of resources consulted by those translating from scratch. These findings suggest a difference in information needs, thus aligning with previous studies of a similar nature but with a focus on non-specialised texts (e.g. Daems et al. 2016). As argued by the author, more research is needed to determine the extent to which the early introduction of pre-translated texts and PE can affect the development of thematic knowledge and info-mining skills that precisely contribute to efficiency, reliability and ultimately quality in legal translation, including PE.

The last paper of the special issue, by this guest editor with Diego Guzmán, analyses the impact of specialised training on professional competence and performance in institutional legal translation. The study compares the revision scores of 44 institutional translators according to their academic backgrounds (legal translation specialisation, translation degrees with no legal specialisation, law degrees or other degrees) and legal translation experience. The text to be revised, a poor-quality human translation of a legal report, was selected to test the core methodological and domain-specific competences applied to ensure quality in legal translation, including revisions or reuses of human translations or machine inputs, as these are increasingly embedded in translators’ daily work. In fact, the origin of the translation was not revealed to participants and approximately two thirds of them believed that it was raw MT output.

At equal experience levels, qualified translators with a specialisation in legal translation outperformed those with academic backgrounds in law, translation (but no specialisation in legal translation) and other fields. The scores of justified, missing and over-corrections, among other indicators, point to a significant differential impact of legal translator training and subject matter knowledge on legal translation quality assurance, while experience seems to partially fill certain training gaps and proves an ‘equalising factor’ in LTC development especially when translators have been trained in translation or law. The results of a subsequent holistic assessment of the revised target text generally aligned with the revision scores, and revealed great disparities in the participants’ perceptions of quality depending on their degree of specialisation.

While the findings cannot be conclusive about LTC levels for all legal translation scenarios, they provide solid evidence of the added value of legal translator training, and serve to challenge perceptions that question such value, including those behind ISO 20771:2020 qualification requirements. They also remind us of the implications of insufficient specialisation among practitioners, and make a long-overdue empirical contribution to the persistent debate about the most relevant pathways to professional practice in legal translation.

5. Closing remarks

The selected contributions present a unique mosaic of applied research and practical innovations that capture the latest developments in legal and institutional translation and the proactive role of translator education in this area at a critical juncture of technological change. As illustrated above, these adaptations have stimulated new insights into the essence of what is required to develop human translator competence in the new era of interaction with artificial intelligence. The essential work of reinforcing the link between professional practice, research and the classroom is reflected in the key questions posed and the enlightening responses provided in the form of valuable empirical data, examples and ideas for trainers and trainees.

These insights should contribute to improving legal and institutional translator education, as they shed light on the integral components of LTC, how to develop them in today’s learner-centred training approaches and why specialised training matters. In turn, this new knowledge about LTC supports a renewed awareness of the crucial value of specialised translator education itself, as excellence in legal and institutional translation is sorely needed and adequate training remains critical for achieving it, perhaps more than ever, despite or precisely because of rapid technological advances.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the authors for their relevant contributions, as well as the reviewers for their valuable insights, and ITT’s editors for their trust and fruitful cooperation through the editing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Recommendation 2008/C 111/01 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2008 on the establishment of the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning.

2. Council Recommendation 2017/C 189/03 of 22 May 2017 on the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning and repealing the recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2008 on the establishment of the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning. Annex I to the revised EQF reproduces the following definition from the first 2008 version (point (i)): ‘“competence” means the proven ability to use knowledge, skills and personal, social and/or methodological abilities, in work or study situations and in professional and personal development’ (Annex 1, point (i)).

3. For the sake of simplicity, ‘LTC’ will also be used for ‘legal and institutional translator competence’ throughout this introduction.

4. ‘Legal Translation in International Institutional Settings: Scope, Strategies and Quality Markers’ (https://transius.unige.ch/letrint/).