Tag: legal translators

 In mid-November 2023 the Law Society of England and Wales released a short guide on the essentials of Generative AI for lawyers.

Check out our short 10-point summary …

Generative AI in the Legal Sector:

The emergence of generative AI in the legal sector offers new possibilities for increased technology adoption but also introduces various risks.

AI’s Long-term Impact: The long-term impact of generative AI on the legal profession is uncertain, though some law firms are already using and investing in these tools.
Opportunities and Risks: Generative AI may present opportunities for improved service, cost reduction, and meeting new client demands, but also comes with risks such as data and technology risks.
Intellectual Property and Data Risks: Concerns include potential copyright infringement, misuse or disclosure of confidential information, and data protection risks.
Cybersecurity Risks: Vulnerabilities to hacking, data breaches, and corruption of data sources are significant concerns.
Integrity of Outputs and Ethical Concerns: Generative AI could produce misleading or inaccurate outputs, and reflect societal biases present in training data, leading to unfair results.
Reputational Risks: Negative consequences for clients could lead to reputational and brand damage.
Regulatory and Professional Responsibilities: Ensure a comprehensive understanding of, and strict adherence to, regulatory and professional responsibilities, especially in relation to the use of generative AI within your legal practice.
Risk Management Strategies:  Conduct meticulous risk management by rigorously fact-checking all information. Perform due diligence in your practice. Always ensure compliance with all legal and ethical standards.
Considerations for use in Legal Practice: Examine the use of generative AI tools in your legal practice thoroughly, focusing on data management and client communication. Regularly assess the tool’s relevance and the added value it provides, while weighing these benefits against the potential risks involved.

Keep your eyes peeled for a follow-up post on how all this relates to legal translation

For legal translators the links are clear but our next post will spell them out for lawyers and law firms

The call for proposals for “Jurilinguistics III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” has been extended to 18 March.

If you work in the fields of legal translation/interpreting, and have something interesting to say about them, the training of legal translators, or terminology resources in those fields, do consider submitting a paper. The last two editions in Seville were great. The third edition will be in Cambridge later this year (1-2 October 2020). Jurtrans will be there, and hopefully I’ll be presenting a paper.

A couple of interesting talks on legal translation and court interpreting are coming up in the next few days and weeks…Continue Reading..

Excellent news as the LLM in Legal Translation is relaunched as a blended learning degree.Continue Reading..

Eva Angelopoulou provides her overview of events for legal translators and interpreters held earlier this year by EULITA:Continue Reading..

On  Thursday, 21 September, the University of Birmingham will host a seminar on ” Law, translation and migration: an enlightening relationship”. The event is free but requires pre-registration. The announcement about the event and the full programme are reproduced below:

“Challenges of legal translation have existed for a long time in international law and international relations. However, the intense process of globalization since the latter half of the 20th century has led to a rapid increase of international treaties and agreements, regional governance, international organizations, NGOs and courts as well as growing reliance on international arbitration.

Much of this globalized legal work is performed through translation. In spite of its long history and recent proliferation, legal translation remains underexplored, particularly from a socio-legal perspective. In fact, research on the intersection of law and translation has tended to concentrate on a rather limited agenda with broader issues being neglected. Therefore, migration is an appropriate and innovative lens to pursue this broader investigation and to tackle the following key issues: what are the various effects of globalisation on this intersection? What is the impact of legal translation on the acceptance of concepts and ideas into other (legal) cultures? What are the effects of the ‘translated’ word on the perception of the very phenomena it portrays?

This seminar will not only further our understanding of the intersection of law and translation, but it will advance knowledge and analysis on migration, an issue central to our times. By addressing the intersection of law and translation in this way, it will  reveal novel questions, effects or links to migration, thus advancing the intellectual agenda of the socio-legal community.”

Programme

Morning

Workshop 1 – Language and migration – A complex relationship

Professor Ann-Marie Fortier – University of Lancaster (Department of sociology):
‘On (not) speaking English: colonial legacies in language requirements for British citizenship’ 

Professor Eleanor Spaventa – University of Durham (School of Law):
“Language and the internal market”

Professor François Grin – Université de Genève (Faculty of translation and interpreting)
“Language, mobility and inclusion in the EU: the MIME project”

Workshop 2 – Portrayal of the nexus translation and migration

Professor Lucja Biel – University of Warsaw (Faculty of applied linguistics):
‘Translation and the law: A case study of a corpus of (legal) translation on migration’ 

Professor Loredana Polezzi – University of Cardiff (School of Modern Languages):
‘The portrayal in contemporary literary texts of the relationship between migration, translation and the law”

Afternoon:

Workshop 3 – ‘Translating migration’ in practice

Professor Angela Creese & Professor Adrian Blackledge – University of Birmingham (School of Education):
‘Translation in everyday practice”

Dr Frances Rock – University of Cardiff (School of English, communication and philosophy)
“Just because she’s a solicitor that doesn’t make her any better than you”: Law, translation and migration in confronting disadvantage through enlightened relationships in legal advice”

Dr Elpida Loupaki – Aristotle University of Thessalonika (Department of French studies and literature):
‘Translating migration – beyond terminology’

Piotr Wegorowski – University of Cardiff (School of English, communication and philosophy)
“Translating institutional procedures: the case of community policing”

 

source: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/law/events/2017/law-translation-migration.aspx

Tools of the legal translator’s trade, a new blog by me published today on the IALS Legal Translation hub looking at the various tools legal translators use in their profession.  Click here to read more:

Tools of the legal translator’s trade

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

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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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.

 

 

Over recent years there has been increasing interest in ‘professionalizing’ legal translation and court interpreting, with a series of academic papers on the subject, many of which are of interest to legal translators and court interpreters. Much of this has been as a direct result of  Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to translation and interpretation in criminal proceedings, which has stimulated debate across Europe on the need for better court interpreters and highlighted the importance of getting legal translation right. Against this background, this November Cambridge Scholars Publishing will release a book on legal translation entitled “Towards the Professionalization of Legal Translators & Court Interpreters in the EU”, edited by Martina Bajčić and Katja Dobrić Basaneže, both of whom teach at the Faculty of Law in Rijeka, Croatia.

The description of the forthcoming book provided by the publisher is as follows:

“The profession of legal translators and interpreters has been unjustly neglected despite its relevant role in international and multilingual legal settings. In order to bridge this gap, this volume brings together contributions from some of the leading experts in the field, including not only scholars, but also internationally acclaimed professional legal translators and interpreters. Coming from different EU Member States, the contributors address the status quo of the profession of legal translators and interpreters within their respective states, while proposing ways to raise the standards of the profession. In particular, effort is made to make the profession more uniform Union-wide in terms of training and accreditation of legal translators and interpreters and quality of their services. Topics covered include ISO standards for interpreting services in judicial settings, EULITA, Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to translation and interpretation in criminal proceedings, legal translation, translation of multilingual EU legislation, document translation, whispered interpreting, and the need to introduce uniform programmes for the education and training of legal translators and interpreters. Offering a mix of theory and practice, the book will appeal to scholars, practitioners and students with a special interest in legal translation and interpretation in the EU.”

Certainly sounds like it will make an interesting read for legal translators and court interpreters, though the book is set to retail at £ 61.99, which may mean it has a small audience.


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