Professionalizing Legal Translator Training: Prospects and Opportunities

Abstract

Legal transactions have permeated every aspect of our life. Much of this is accomplished through legal translators who, by their outputs, impact our personal and professional future. That said, this article seeks to tackle the challenges and opportunities in preparing legal translators for professional practice. The article is a quality review in its nature which adopts the descriptive approach. The interactionist perspective is adopted in this present article to examine the challenges faced by and the opportunities offered to legal translators under training. This examination is placed within the context of the rapidly evolving translation industry and its related interdisciplinary research, which covers the technology and legal translation, quality in legal translation, and training pathways for legal translators. The subjective perspective is acknowledged as the human experience is involved to explain the individual phenomena within broader context of legal translation profession. The article draws that there is a need to make changes in the legal translation status because we need to improve the translator’s perception of their role. Moreover, training models adopted to prepare legal translators have to be updated by revising the outdated practices of legal translation, and integrating the social role to face the new challenges as the translators are the intercultural mediators who facilitate the international legal communication.