The Crépeau Centre, in collaboration with the Network of Jurilinguistics Centres, has just announced the programme for the 12th Summer Institute of Jurilinguistics to be held at McGill University’s Faculty of Law on 15 June 2018.
Eva Angelopoulou provides her overview of events for legal translators and interpreters held earlier this year by EULITA:Continue Reading..
Following on from the previous post about upcoming conferences relevant to legal translation, language and law, a few more conferences on the topic have been drawn to my attention by colleagues. Many thanks!
So adding these 2, that makes a total of 7 more conferences on legal translation this year.Continue Reading..
Hard on the heels of the very interesting event “Legal translation to the next level” held on 4 February here in London come a series of other events and conferences all relating to the topic. The tagline for the London conference was that legal translators should ‘roar to the world’ about their existence. Another 5 conferences happening this year will certainly help get the message out there about what legal translators do and the important role they play. So here’s a quick round-up of forthcoming legal translation events:Continue Reading..
The role of legal translators, and of legal translation as an activity, is attracting increasing attention, with a host of conferences having been organised on the subject or closely related topics in recent years.
I’ve recently returned from a very interesting and productive conference in Seville entitled, “From Legal Translation to Jurilinguistics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” held at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in late October.
The recent conference in Seville emphasised the important role legal translators have to play
Some of the key themes that emerged at the conference for me were:
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The vital communicative role that legal translators have to play
Prof. Jan Engberg, an expert in knowledge communication, stressed that legal translation is all about the translator being able to communicate specialised knowledge so that people (typically but not always lawyers) in one knowledge community can understand what is being said by people in another knowledge community. Legal translators mediate and broker the transfer of that knowledge and are interested in solving the linguistic problems that emerge in conveying knowledge. Their primary goal should be to create a text in the target situation that can be read in the right way by its audience. He stressed the importance of comparative law in this regard; which brings us to the next major theme at the conference.
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The importance of comparative law skills for legal translators
Another broad theme at the conference was the importance of comparative law, and the importance of a transystemic approach to the study of law to enable legal translation to occur more easily because of greater understanding on the part of legal translators of what the concepts involved mean in, and across, legal systems; a topic addressed by Prof. Emerich in her keynote address.
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How important it is for legal translators to correctly position themselves in the market
Building on the vital communicative role legal translators play, Juliette Scott, emphasised in her presentation the importance of legal translators correctly positioning themselves in the market, and stressed how important it is for legal translators to choose the correct terms when referring to themselves, primarily because of the impact this has on how the market perceives them as professionals.
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The growing importance of corpuses for identifying language patterns and for aiding consistency and improving quality in legal translation
In her keynote speech Prof. L. Biel examined the historical development of corpuses in translation and discussed the importance of corpuses so far as a research tool. Since legal language is highly patterned and formulaic, corpuses are proving useful in identifying these patterns; though some translation studies have indicated that despite such high formulaicity, translators often have a tendency to use their own phrases rather than the patterns that would typically be used in corresponding target language texts. Somehow “translation as a process” is interfering. It is to be hoped that corpuses can be operationalised to ensure greater consistency across languages to improve translation quality. Gianluca Pontrandolfo also presented interesting corpus-based research on judicial phraseology, and several other speakers provided practical examples of how corpuses can promote better quality legal translations.
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The need for better quality legal dictionaries
On a related point, several speakers analysed the difficulties one often encounters with legal dictionaries and presented projects aimed at creating better quality legal dictionaries or glossaries, presenting some interesting methodologies such as the ‘least bad possible equivalents’ for terms when two legal systems do not have the same concepts (Frison & Gavrilova) or a participative, interactive glossary-development process (Fiola).
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The role of the EU’s directive on translation and interpreting in criminal settings
Several other papers addressed the progress made so far in adapting the law in various EU countries to the requirements of the recent directive on translation and interpreting in criminal settings, revealing that transposition has not always been a smooth process.
A ‘Forum on Quality in Legal Translation’ is being organised on 6 June 2016 by the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw and the DGT Field Office in Poland as part of the #TranslatingEurope project and is one of a series of Translating Europe Workshops taking place in all EU Member States. The forum will look at quality in legal translation from three perspectives: the academic, market and training perspectives, with panels moderated by experts in the field of legal translation.
The draft programme is available at: http://translatingeurope.blog.ils.uw.edu.pl/draft-programme/
Organisers:
The Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw
The DGT Field Office in Poland
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Fernando Prieto Ramos, University of Geneva
Prof. Hendrik Kockaert, KU Leuven.
Quality in Legal Translation
The Academic Perspective moderated by Dr Anna Jopek-Bosiacka
The Market Perspective moderated by Dr Agnieszka Biernacka
The Training Perspective moderated by Dr hab. Łucja Biel
Source: http://translatingeurope.blog.ils.uw.edu.pl/
The Transius Centre will hold a Symposium on Corpus Analysis in Legal Research and Legal Translation Studies on 3 June 2016.
As part of this symposium, speakers will discuss how to make corpus analysis more accessible and fruitful in applied research. The advantages and challenges of using different types of corpora and analytical methods will be examined from various interdisciplinary angles.
The symposium will be preceded by a seminar on corpus querying and statistics for corpus linguistics led by Dr Aleksandar TRKLJA (University of Birmingham) in the afternoon of Thursday 2 June. The aim of this seminar is to introduce participants to basic principles and methods of corpus linguistics for the study of interdisciplinary issues in monolingual and multilingual contexts.
For more details please visit the following website:
http://transius.unige.ch/en/conferences-and-seminars/corpus-symposium-16/
Registration is now open. Please note that there is a limited number of places to participate, and that they will be attributed on a first-come, first-served basis.
Source: http://transius.unige.ch/en
TransLaw 2016, Tampere, Finland – preliminary programme
Last year we reported on the announcement of a conference to be held in Tampere, Finland, entitled “Translation and Interpreting as a Means of Guaranteeing Equality under Law”.
You can read our post about the conference here.
The conference’s preliminary programme has now been released and there are a few talks that look really worthwhile from the viewpoint of legal translation.
For example, it might be interesting to find out how legal translators are certified in different countries (“Certifying legal translators – a comparative approach”). On the second day there is a talk entitled “Background knowledge of the legal systems involved as a precondition for successful translation”, which refers (i) to teaching methods for legal translation in Norway and (ii) to JurDist, an online course on legal translation for legal translators who translate from Norwegian into English, French, Spanish or German. Later the same day there’s another talk entitled “Translating deontic modality in legal texts”. Given current general trend in English towards simplifying the language of the law, this talk should provide an up-to-date picture of the subject of how the verb ‘shall’ can and should be used to express an obligation. The majority of other talks refer to legal interpreting in police and courtroom settings.
Registration for this conference closes on Monday, 4 April. For further details, including fees and accommodation, visit their website.
By: Eva Angelopoulou
The German Society for Forensic Linguistics (GSFL) has just announced an event indirectly relevant to legal translation which explores issues of language, evidence, multilingualism and the law, and court interpreting.
Continue Reading..
Late announcement:
The University of Geneva is hosting a talk tomorrow on “The complexities of legal translation in the drafting of bilateral treaties between Italy and English-speaking countries”. The Speaker is Dr Rocco LOIACONO (The University of Western Australia/Curtin University). The talk is at 12:00 hours in Room 6077 of the University’s Uni Mail building in Geneva tomorrow Wednesday 2 March.
This is part of the Transius Talks Series which addresses various aspects of legal translation.
Source: Transius network
By Eva Angelopoulou
