Abstract
What can lawyers learn from translators? : Lessons to be learned from translation theories and applied to teaching legal English to students at a law faculty.
Due to the asymmetry between the common law system and civil law system, teaching legal English is quite a challenge for both the tutor and the students. A legal English course must necessarily involve a comparison of the two legal systems and make students think critically about various legal principles, concepts and institutions and the way they are applied or used, if at all, in different legal systems. Unlike students of translation studies, law students are not systematically warned of the dangers of ready-made dictionary solutions (usually bilingual ones) or machine translation, and they increasingly rely on AI and translation engines. Why not take language tuition a step further and teach law students how to use comparison to decide if there is a sufficient equivalence between legal terms from different legal systems, so that they can be used to accurately relay a message in a field where accuracy is a must? After all, law students working in offices or junior lawyers at the beginning of their careers are often (rather unfairly) asked to translate legal texts, even if they are not trained in this.
With a few practical examples, this paper will consider the benefits of introducing comparative conceptual analysis, one of the crucial skills a translator of legal texts should possess, into the language tuition at a law school, particularly into a legal English course, and show how an awareness of the asymmetry of the legal systems, and a comparative analysis of the legal concepts used in those systems, can help law students cope with finding equivalent terms - that is, how comparative conceptual analysis can be applied to teaching legal English terminology to lawyers-to-be.