Human translation vs. machine translation: A constrastive analysis and factors involving machine translation use for legal translation

Abstract

In the current context of technological advancements and development of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of our societies and technological improvements are transforming our lives in all areas. Translation is no exception. With the emergence of neural machine translation (nmt), a new paradigm of machine translation (mt), the quality offered by such systems has improved substantially, and some authors even claim that mt systems equal or surpass human translation quality in certain fields such as news. However, specialized genres involve intrinsic complexities. In legal translation, the anisomorphism of legal language can be a very difficult gap for machines to bridge: different terms for the same concept in different legal systems, zero or partial equivalence, and so on. In this study, a human evaluation of three human translations of English-Spanish company contracts and one translation generated by a nmt engine will be carried out. Results show that mt could be a very useful teaching tool in the legal translation classroom, allowing to identify the skills that could be enhanced by such an approach. Finally, how mt could be incorporated into the training of legal translators is proposed, and the advantages it would have over traditional teaching-learning methods are presented.