Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR)

Profile

My PhD examines ways to improve the quality of legal translations, both upstream and downstream.

Context/background for research

The legal genre is subject to stringent conformity requirements. Legal translators are rarely trained as lawyers, and may be unsure of correspondence with certain target sublanguage and subgenre conventions and with appropriate collocations. Research and resources are mainly limited to the genre of legislation – little material is available in the corporate and court-related legal genres that make up the majority of freelancers’ bread-and-butter work.

Scope of research

The project has two main strands: firstly to verify and examine the needs of those commissioning legal translations, and secondly to further trial a DIY corpus methodology with professional legal translators in a range of language pairs and subgenres. The aim is also to carry out translation studies research that is relevant to business practice.

Discipline areas

Legal translation, jurilinguistics, collocations, genre theory applied to the law, language for specific purposes (LSP), terminology, corpus linguistics, DIY corpora, corpus use for learning to translate (CULT), comparative law, applications of technology to translation and to research.

Conference papers presented

• DIY corpora to assist legal translators in producing texts in line with target audience expectations – Presented at Tradulinguas International Legal Translation Conference, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, 7-8 October 2011
• Towards professional uptake of DIY electronic corpora in legal genres. – Presented at the OCTIS conference: Translation and interpreting in the digital age: Perspectives on practice and research, University of Salford, UK, 21 October 2011
• Legal discourse(s) in translation: how can corpus linguistics do more for freelance non-literary translators? – Presented at Corpus Linguistics Applied: Corpora, Discourse and Contemporary Social Issues, Corpus Linguistics in the South, Queen Mary College, London, UK, 11 February 2012
• What sort of legal translations do the corporate world and the judiciary want? – Presented at the 2^nd International Conference Law, Language and Professional Practice, Faculty of Law, University of Naples 2, Caserta, Italy, 10-12 May 2012
• Can DIY corpora assist professional translators in 'learning the lingo' of legal subgenres? – Presented at the 7^th conference on Legal translation, Court interpreting and Comparative Legal Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, 29 June – 1 July 2012

Memberships

• RELINE Legal Linguistics Network
• International Language and Law Association (ILLA)
• The Society of Legal Scholars
• Chartered Institute of Linguists