In order to ensure successful subprocesses within the overall legal translation process, a correct and comprehensive understanding of the source text is crucial. Legal translators must be able to grasp all the legal, linguistic, communicative, and situational dimensions of the text. The focus of this study is on the cognitive processes involved in the first reading phase of the legal translation process and, in particular, on the question of whether legal translators and lawyers have different text reception processes. By analysing the think-aloud protocols recorded in a mixed-methods study, legal meta-comments (LMCs) from translators and lawyers are examined and compared. The results suggest that the two groups approach the text from different angles, which leads to some suggestions for further developing the training of legal translators.
Barrier-free communication should be an institutional priority
when drafting administrative texts. These not only deal with legal content, but
they often address the lay citizen and may provide general information on
services and reforms or simply instruct on a specific procedure to be followed.
Our study investigates Swiss insurance leaflets in three languages (French,
German and Italian) and aims at evaluating language clarity on the basis of
‘plain language’ guidelines, thus also considering the translation variable.
However, our preliminary results show that ‘plain communication’ is not always
the case. We applied a quantitative and qualitative triangulation methodology: firstly, we measured readability with the help of readability indices; subsequently, we used computational tools to highlight common linguistic gaps whose quality was also explored manually by taking textual aspects into account.
Legal texts place particular demands on the reader owing to the institutionalized communication situation, their abstract content and language, and the indirect connection of the utterances with the extralinguistic and extralegal world. Most legal translators are not legal experts. Therefore, accessing the meaning of legal argumentation represents a major challenge, especially as legal translators mainly have to comprehend and translate texts issuing from a foreign legal system with its own legal language and terminology. With the aim of explaining the particular difficulties of legal text understanding and translation, this article takes up some general theoretical approaches of mental organization of word knowledge and speech comprehension developed in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics. These general models are adapted to the understanding of legal text comprehension, focusing on the mental representation of highly abstract legal language and legal arguing. On that basis, a cognitive-translational model of legal text understanding is developed. Finally the use of the model is discussed as a theoretical contribution to legal translator training and with regard to the particular position of the legal translator within the communication process.
Au cours de la dernière décennie, les langages contrôlés (LC) ont toujours été l’objet d’une attention accrue en traduction automatique (TA). La majorité des études ont porté sur l’impact des LC sur la qualité du produit final de la TA, mais très peu d’entre elles se sont intéressées à l’impact de la TA sur l’accessibilité des textes cibles pour les personnes à besoins particuliers. Cet article vise à combler cette lacune. Il cherche à déterminer, par le biais d’une étude linguistique comparative, si les systèmes de TA génériques constituent une option viable pour produire, à partir de textes simplifiés sources, des textes cibles faciles à lire et à comprendre (FALC). Nous avons testé trois outils génériques de TA (DeepL, Google Translate et Yandex) avec des textes FALC de trois domaines différents, dans quatre paires de langues. Les résultats montrent que DeepL est l’outil le plus performant et que l’espagnol et les textes administratifs restent ceux qui occasionnent le plus de problèmes pour la TA. En ce qui concerne l’évaluation de l’accessibilité linguistique, les problèmes aux niveaux lexical et stylistique sont les plus nombreux. Même si la TA ne produit pas encore des textes FALC acceptables, notre étude en souligne le potentiel et met l’accent sur la difficulté de créer du contenu multilingue accessible pour tous.
Hesitation and lexical repair markers are part of almost every audibly pronounced sentence. Empirical linguistics
generally bases its examinations on spontaneous speech production. This paper uses the discourse analytical approach of empirical
linguistics to analyse think-aloud protocols produced by translators and lawyers in a mixed methods study combining thinking aloud
and eyetracking. Two expert groups—lawyers and translators, comprising both professionals and students—read complex
legal texts in French and summarised them in German, their mother tongue. A mainly qualitative analysis evaluates and categorises
the occurrences and functions of various German hesitation and discourse markers. This not only provides information about the use
of fillers and repair actions during speech but also insights into reception processes and perceptions of text difficulty. A
quantitative analysis of pause fillers suggests that the reception processes of lawyers and translators differ.
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