A didactic sequence to help legal translation trainees develop strategic and intercultural competence: macro-level textual consequences of micro-level decisions when dealing with legal culture-bound terms

ABSTRACT

Translating legal culture-bound terms is one of the difficulties facing any legal translator due to asymmetries between national legal systems. To train trainees to deal with these terms, strategic and intercultural competences must be developed. This article focuses on how to pedagogically address the varying degrees of incongruity that may arise when translating legal culture-bound terms. The learning objectives set are for trainees to be able to apply the most appropriate translation technique to use in each instance, selecting it at a micro-unit level that is coherent with the macro-level approach determined by the communicative situation and target text purpose. A theoretical and pedagogical framework is presented, followed by the description of a didactic sequence that was created as action research to develop trainees’ strategic and intercultural competences. The didactic sequence includes 4 units with task-based learning activities and formative and summative assessment. The activities were piloted in a postgraduate specialisation course in legal translation at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Trainee responses to a follow-up survey and focus group show that the activities were perceived to be useful and helpful when dealing with the difficulty of translating legal culture-bound terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Legal translation training
• legal culture-bound terms
• strategic competence development
• intercultural competence development
• translation techniques
• macro-level and micro-level decisions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A DS is described by Zabala (1998) as ‘a set of ordered, structured and articulated activities for the achievement of certain educational objectives, which have a principle and an end known to both teacher and student’.

2. Formative assessment gives the trainee feedback that supports the learning process and can take place among peers or from teacher to trainee/s. It is different from summative assessment in that it does not take the form of a numeric score or grade (see definitions and examples in Orozco-Jutorán 2006, Galán-Mañas and Hurtado 2015).

3. This is a bad quality translation found on the Internet without any source or authorship quoted. It was chosen for this activity to make the trainees aware of the differences between a bad quality legal translation (Figure 1) and a good quality translation (Figure 2), but this is not made explicit to the trainees, as they are supposed to infer it in steps 5–7 of this session.

4. Figure 2 was translated by the trainer.

5. Presents given to children on the night of 5^th January, supposedly brought by the Three Wise Men.

6. Although the translation brief is usually given for any translation assignment in class, as in real practice, in this DS, it is the class that decides the brief. This pedagogical approach is deliberately aimed at fostering trainees’ reflection on the potential variation of briefs and their implications.