How do translation trainees look for information during legal translation?

What is it about?

This article looks at how trainee translators find information when translating a legal text from English into Polish. The translator's workspace has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Now translators have more sources than just printed books. This article presents a study on how translators use different sources when translating. The students on the translation programme at the University of Silesia, Poland, are the focus of the study. The investigation used observation and think-aloud protocols. Most of the sources looked up were dictionaries (72.70%). The other sources were used much less often. Only bilingual dictionaries were popular. There were few consultations of monolingual dictionaries. Electronic sources were used more than printed ones. As expected, most participants wanted to know the equivalent of a source language word (34.63% of the total). The meaning of a word was the second most desired information (19.86%). It was surprising to discover that most participants used bilingual dictionaries to find the meaning. Two thirds of searches involved one look-up (62.89%). Far too often the participants, when faced with problems, automatically consulted bilingual sources and copy-pasted the equivalents found, without having given enough attention to the nature of the problem, the needs of the target audience or the function of the text.

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Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash