DÍA No. 1
ERROR ANALYSIS AND CHOICE OF EXPRESSION
IN SPANISH - ENGLISH LEGAL TRANSLATION PRACTICE

Hands-on practice at sentence and paragraph level
for translators wishing to hone their Spanish-into-English legal translation skills

Aims
- To provide translators with tools to detect and account for errors in Spanish-to-English legal translation.
- To work on the improvement of expression in terms of fluency, economy of phrase, and the stylistic demands of legal discourse.
- To discuss a number of lexical and grammatical items that often give rise to miscomprehension and mistranslation.

Highlights
- The legal translator as his/her own or someone else’s editor or reviser.
- Error analysis as a proactive technique: the process of error-tracking.
- Spotting, describing, explaining and correcting non-obvious and not-so-obvious errors at the grammatical, lexical and stylistic levels.
- Improving expression without detracting from accuracy.
- Distinguishing obscurity and legalese from legal style in its own right.
- A turn of the screw: correctness versus appropriateness and naturalness in legal discourse.
- Troublesome and innocent-looking legal terms.
- The overblown implications of “plain English” and the tough reality of complex corporate and litigation documents.

DÍA No. 2
STRATEGIES FOR THE TRANSLATION OF
ARGUMENTATIVE LEGAL TEXTS FROM SPANISH INTO ENGLISH

Aims
- To use a wide variety of lexical resources and appropriate phraseology in the Spanish-into-English translation of argumentative legal texts, such as court decisions, legal opinions, excerpts from books of authority and similar written pieces.
- To systematize and organize those resources, in Spanish and English, in accordance with the following specific functions:

·      Arguing and giving opinion
·      Giving reasons
·      Assessing and interpreting
·      Agreeing and disagreeing
·      Taking sides

- To enhance written expression in legal English through the use of set phrases, specific collocations, and idioms considered appropriate in today’s legal discourse.
- To work out translation and equivalence problems posed by various terms (from the areas of Contract Law, Business and Corporate Law and Labor Law, among others) occurring in the material presented for translation.

Activities
- Interactive Spanish-into-English translation practice, at sentence and paragraph level, with adequate prior contextualization.
- Focusing on the demands of specific functions of language.
- Distinguishing problems of expression from terminological issues:

·      For example, in the sentence “los argumentos en defensa de la tesis de que la actora no puede agredir bienes ajenos al contrato no resisten el menor análisis”, the units “argumentos en defensa de una tesis” and “no resistir el menor análisis” will be analyzed separately from the units “agredir bienes” and “bienes ajenos al contrato”.