With the advent of the neural paradigm, machine translation has made another leap in quality. As a result, its use by trainee translators has increased considerably, which cannot be disregarded in translation pedagogy. However, since legal texts have features that pose major challenges to machine translation, the question arises as to what extent machine translation is now capable of translating legal texts or at least certain types of legal text into another legal language well enough so that the post-editing effort is limited, and, consequently, whether a targeted use in translation pedagogy can be considered. In order to answer this question, DeepL Translator, a machine translation system, and MateCat, a CAT system that integrates machine translation, were tested. The test, undertaken at different times and without specific translation memories, provided for the translation of several legal texts of different types utilising both systems, and was followed by systematisation of errors and evaluation of translation results. The evaluation was carried out according to the following criteria: 1) comprehensibility and meaningfulness of the target text; and 2) correspondence between source and target text in consideration of the specific translation situation. Overall, the results are considered insufficient to give post-editing of machine-translated legal texts a bigger place in translation pedagogy. As the evaluation of the correspondence between source and target text was fundamentally worse than with regard to the meaningfulness of the target text, translation pedagogy should respond by raising awareness about differences between machine translation output and human translation in this field, and by improving translation approach and strengthening legal expertise.
This article deals with the diffi culties encountered by the translator with no legal background in consulting resources conveying legal knowledge, ranging from the text of the law to the legal encyclopaedia, designed for lawyers, lawyers and non-lawyers, lawyers and legal translators respectively. Starting from the translation from Italian into German of a text of company law, there is fi rst of all a description of the legal knowledge required by the legal translator to translate the legal text in question and the legal knowledge conveyed by the text for translation itself. After an overview of the resources that the legal translator may draw on to integrate any gaps in his legal knowledge, there is an illustration of the problems linked to the different types of resources, concluding with a demonstration of the advantages of a resource such as JUSLEX, designed and created exclusively for the legal translator.
Within the framework of modern terminological findings, a new approach for the description of legal terms is presented which attempts to overcome the limitations posed by the traditional conceptual understanding of Wüster’s theory of terminology. The central question deals with the role of definition, which is of importance in the delimitation of legal terms, but more so and particularly in the formation of legal concepts. Viewed from the perspective of a modern conceptual understanding, legal concepts are the result, not the object of definition. Often, however , they may be formed through definitions only in the core area, but not in the marginal area important for the differentiation of legal concepts, and this means that further debate on the objects of law is required. By defining legal terms, and not legal concepts, a basic precondition is created for taking into consideration not only the subject specialist but also the linguistic context, and thus for fully taking into account the needs of the legal translator.
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