Book Review: Legal Translation Outsourced (J. R. Scott)13 August 2019 - by Helene Walters-SteinbergJuliette Scott’s Legal Translation Outsourced serves
as a bridge between practitioners of legal translation and research into
language and law. It offers an analysis of the key risks and constraints for
commercial legal translation and also puts forth original theoretical models to
assist legal translators and other stakeholders.
Although the field of legal translation itself is quite
vast, legal translators often specialise in specific areas (such as corporate
documents, financial-legal documents, notarial documents, court-related
documents, insurance documents, legislation, certificates or patents). Legal
translators need to be familiar with the subject matter, which can be highly
technical, while also mastering information technology (such as CAT tools or
electronic corpora) and possessing intercultural competencies. Legal documents often follow codified rules
of writing and presentation, with which legal translators need to be familiar
in order to ensure that their translation meets the genre conventions that the
readers expect to see. Scott mentions the use of electronic corpora several times
in this book. Although most translators are familiar with CAT tools
(Computer-Assisted-Translation), the use of electronic corpora is not yet
widespread. Scott argues that electronic corpora could help legal translators
solve issues such as collocations (e.g. whether to use “hold harmless from”
or “hold harmless against”), therefore making the target text more
acceptable to its intended audience. One of the issues facing legal translation is that the
translators are often not in direct contact with the commissioners of the
translation. As a result, they are not always aware of the expectations they
need to meet. Translations should always be fit for purpose, but if the
translator is not aware of that purpose they may struggle to make certain
linguistical and textual decisions. However, if the translator has been
correctly briefed, then this brief can be used to assess the quality of the
final translation. According to the Standard Guide for Quality
Assurance in Translation published
by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), the key elements a
translator must be aware of are the target audience, the purpose, the style
relevance and reference materials. Logistical constraints such as the amount of
time allocated for the translation task, the size of the budget (which may
determine the extent of revision and proofreading) and file formats must also
be taken into account. After analysing past research on translation briefs as well
as some of the guidelines published by the British Council and the European
Union, Scott provides her own preliminary list of legal translation brief
components:
She also suggests using the words “document for translation”
(instead of “source text”) and “translated text” (instead of “target text”) to
make things clearer to clients who are not necessarily aware of the jargon used
by translators. ![]() |