La recerca en traducció jurídica: un marc que combina diverses perspectives i metodologies per a la traducció jurídica
| Autor | Lucja Biel |
| Cargo | Associate Professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics and a Head of Corpus Research Centre, University of Warsaw, Poland |
| Páginas | 75-88 |
RESEARCHING LEGAL TRANSLATION: A MULTI-PERSPECTIVE AND MIXED-
METHOD FRAMEWORK FOR LEGAL TRANSLATION
Łucja Biel*
Abstract
The objective of the paper is to propose a multi-perspective and mixed-method research framework for legal translation
by modelling key dimensions and factors applicable to legal translation. As a result of the ongoing expansion of Legal
Translation Studies, the eld is experiencing a methodological development, which extends our perspective on legal
translation. The paper proposes four postulates for the multi-perspective framework for researching legal translation
— namely, transdisciplinarity, multidimensionality, bidirectionality, and multimethodology. The multi-perspective
research framework for legal translation embraces a continuum of four key dimensions of translation, i.e. the product
itself, the context of production and reception, process and participants, modelled according to their dominant factors,
components and related methods of research. The second part of the paper investigates, by way of illustration, how
corpus methods interact with the above proposed multi-perspective framework. In the conclusions it is argued that
research into legal translation may be expected to become increasingly larger in scale and more teamwork-based in
order to accommodate multiple perspectives on the object of study.
Keywords: Legal translation, research framework, triangulation, mixed methods.
LA RECERCA EN TRADUCCIÓ JURÍDICA: UN MARC QUE COMBINA DIVERSES
PERSPECTIVES I METODOLOGIES PER A LA TRADUCCIÓ JURÍDICA
Resum
Aquest article té com a objectiu proposar un marc de recerca que combina diverses perspectives i metodologies per a
la traducció jurídica, mitjançant la conguració de dimensions i factors clau aplicables a la traducció jurídica. Com
a conseqüència de l’expansió dels estudis de traducció jurídica vigents, aquest camp experimenta un desenvolupament
metodològic que eixampla la nostra visió sobre el camp de la traducció jurídica. L’article proposa quatre postulats
per al marc de recerca esmentat, que són la transdisciplinarietat, la multidimensionalitat, la bidireccionalitat i la
multimetodologia. Aquest marc, a més, comprèn un contínuum de quatre dimensions que són primordials en traducció,
com ara, el producte mateix, el context de producció textual i recepció, els procediments i els participants, que es con-
guren segons els factors, els components i les metodologies de recerca associades, que hi predominin. La segona part
de l’article investiga, a tall d’exemple, com les metodologies basades en corpus interactuen amb el marc polifacètic
proposat. En les conclusions, sostenim que és possible que la recerca en el camp de la traducció jurídica creixi cada
vegada més i que es dugui a terme en equips per tal d’ajustar les diverses perspectives en l’objecte d’estudi.
Paraules clau: traducció jurídica; marc de recerca; triangulació; metodologies mixtes.
* Łucja Biel, Associate Professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics and a Head of Corpus Research Centre, University of Warsaw,
Poland. l.biel@uw.edu.pl
Article received: 31.03.2017. Review: 14.06.2017. Final version accepted: 21.07.2017.
Recommended citation: Biel, Łucja. “Researching Legal Translation: A multi-perspective and mixed-method framework for legal
translation”. Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, issue 68, 2017, p. 76-88. DOI: 10.2436/rld.i68.2017.2967
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 77
Summary
1 Research into legal translation: recent developments
1.1 Expanding Legal Translation Studies: in need of data integration and synthesis
1.2 Specicity of legal translation
1.3 Research methods in LTS: emerging methodological shifts
2 Multiple perspectives on researching legal translation
2.1 Assumptions for holistic research into legal translation
2.2 A multi-perspective research framework for legal translation
3 Applicability of the framework: a corpus research model
4 Conclusions
Acknowledgement
Bibliography
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 78
1 Research into legal translation: recent developments
1.1 Expanding Legal Translation Studies: in need of data integration and synthesis
Since the publication of Susan Šarčević’s seminal monograph New Approach to Legal Translation twenty
years ago, Legal Translation Studies (LTS) has been expanding and diversifying itself both thematically
and methodologically. As argued by Prieto Ramos, LTS has moved into a phase of robust growth where it
undergoes consolidation and expansion with reorientation towards applied research (2014: 271-272). This
expansion has been very well visible in the 2010s, with dedicated conferences1, edited monographs2 and
special guest-edited issues of major journals3. While the expansion cannot be questioned, consolidation lags
behind. LTS remains fragmented and dispersed along the interdisciplinary lines (Law, Translation Studies,
Linguistics) and language-specic enclaves — mainly English, French, Spanish, German and Italian (cf.
Biel and Engberg 2013: 2). What is required in near future, as a consequence of expansion, is increased
theoretical and methodological reection on legal translation, integrating and synthesising empirical data
provided by various research projects across disciplines and languages, which will ultimately lead us to the
multi-faceted modelling of legal translation. Following Saldanha and O’Brien (2013: 12), I understand a
model as a representation of the reality — in this case, the reality of legal translation.
This paper intends to partially ll in this gap. Its objective is to propose a multi-perspective and multi-method
research framework for legal translation by modelling key dimensions, components and factors applicable
to LTS.
1.2 Specicity of legal translation
It is difcult to model legal translation due to diverse and not fully compatible types of translational situations.
One of the main categories is intersystemic legal translation — it operates not only between two languages
but also between at least two legal systems, e.g. a translation of a Spanish contract into Swedish. The major
challenge in intersystemic translation is the incongruity of legal terminology due to its system-bound nature
(Šarčević 1997: 232), resulting from its embedding in national legal systems. Legal systems have their
own history, developments, principles, axiology; they shape their concept systems and term boundaries to
respond to their own needs. As a result, terms tend to differ across legal systems and intersystemic translators
are required to compensate for it by building “terminological bridges” (Weigand qtd. in Šarčević, 2012: 13).
The next major type of legal translation — intrasystemic legal translation — may be found in bilingual or
multilingual countries, such as Switzerland or Belgium, as well as in international organisations. Intrasystemic
translations of law tend to have an authoritative (authentic) status (cf. Garzone 2000: 6). In this case legal
concepts are linguistically represented as terms in two different languages but they are shaped by the same
legal system. Yet this clear-cut distinction is an oversimplication in the case of hybrid4 supranational legal
systems with authoritative translations, such as the European Union (EU). The EU has a supranational legal
system, which, however, has mutual interdependencies with national legal systems of currently 28 Member
States: it is a “tertium comparationis (…) combining very different legal systems, cultures and styles”
(Jopek-Bosiacka 2011: 26), where legislation is produced within the supranational system but is applied in
all domestic legal systems (Kjær 2007: 79). The EU legal system is still evolving and is not independent yet;
hence, EU translation is intersystemic to some extent (cf. Šarčević 2013: 10). Another type of hybridity is
Canadian transsystemism (cf. Emerich and Plante, 2018, forthcoming), involving civil law and common law
aspects. All in all, the degree of conceptual mediation between and within legal systems may vary in legal
translation.
1 E.g. the Transius conference on Law, Translation and Culture in Geneva in 2015; the From Legal Translation to Jurilinguistics
Conference in Seville in 2016.
2 E.g. Borja Albi and Prieto Ramos (eds.) (2013), Cheng et al. (eds) (2014), Glanert (ed.) (2014).
3 E.g. Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series — Themes in Translation Studies (2013, ed. by Łucja Biel and Jan Engberg), The
Translator (2014, ed. by Simone Glanert), International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (2015, ed. by Anne Wagner and Jean-
Claude Gémar), The Interpreter and Translator Trainer (2015, ed. by Esther Monzó Nebot), The Journal of Specialised Translation
(2017, ed. by Hendrik Kockaert and Nadia Rahab).
4 Cf. Garzone (2000: 6) for hybrid international texts as a third category of legal translation.
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 79
In addition to the most visible terminological and systemic challenges, legal translators also face language-
specic challenges which result from structural, semantic, and pragmatic differences between languages in
general and between legal genres in particular, as well as challenges typical of the translation process —
connected with complex bilingual processing and frequent language-code switching during the translation
task (e.g. interference, explicitation, underrepresentation of unique items) (see Biel 2014 for further
discussion).
1.3 Research methods in LTS: emerging methodological shifts
As with any type of translation or, more broadly, language studies, the methodology of legal translation
research may be categorised according to the fundamental distinction into quantitative and qualitative
research. Quantitative research methods are oriented towards objective systematic measurements with
statistical methods and large samples of numerical data capable of reducing idiosyncratic variation (Dörnyei
207: 24, 27). Recent years have observed a general trend of the evolution of theoretical and applied linguistics
towards quantitative methods (Gries and Wulff 2012: 34). Within Translation Studies, quantitative methods
include corpus methodologies, questionnaires, eye tracking and other experimental methods. Qualitative
research methods are interested in smaller-scale non-numerical ‘open-ended’ data which account for
idiosyncrasies and individual/subjective meanings (Dörnyei 2007: 24, 27). Their advantages include a more
exible, emergent and exploratory nature, while their weaknesses are: small sample sizes of idiosyncratic
nature and limited generalisability, over-reading of individual examples, examination of ‘telling’ cases,
and risk of conrming researchers’ biases (cf. Dörnyei 2007: 39-41). Qualitative research into translation
includes ethnographic research, (critical) discourse analysis (CDA), sociology of translation, and narrative
analysis. In reality, the divide is not so deep and the two approaches may be seen as complementary. A more
recent trend in social sciences is the multi-method approach which uses more than one method, most notably
the mixed-method approach (also known as multitrait-multimethod research, interrelating qualitative and
quantitative data, cf. Dörnyei 2007: 42) which combines both types of methods through triangulation to
address a research question from alternative perspectives.
Although the mixed-method approach is still rather rare in LTS, methodological shifts have started to emerge
in this eld. The recent intensication and build-up of research has inevitably led to the methodological
development, diversication, and renement of LTS, which — in my opinion — is a major factor behind
the incremental progress achieved by LTS in the last decade. Research into legal translation has traditionally
been predominantly qualitative, product-oriented and descriptive (cf. Biel and Engberg 2013: 2). It has
become, quite naturally, more and more transdisciplinary, exploring not only the interface with Legal
Studies, in particular comparative law, but also with various strands of linguistics. Quite recently researchers
have started to experiment with more varied eclectic methods, involving empirical, quantitative and mixed
approaches (Biel 2017, forthcoming). The methods relatively recently introduced to legal translation studies
include corpus methodology (e.g. Biel 2014, Pontrandolfo 2016), sociology of translation (e.g. Vidal
Claramonte 2005), ethnography and workplace studies, including surveys (e.g. Koskinen 2008), (critical)
discourse analysis (e.g. Borja Albi 2013, Way 2012), as well as practitioner research (Scott 2016). These
developments have been triggered by methodological advances in Translation Studies since the 1990s: the
reorientation towards empiricism (cf. Snell-Hornby 2006: 114), the revival of linguistic methods, including
corpus linguistics, genre analysis and (critical) discourse analysis, as well as the advent of the technological
turn (Cronin 2010).
2 Multiple perspectives on researching legal translation
2.1 Assumptions for holistic research into legal translation
Below I present the main assumptions and postulates for the multi-perspective research framework for legal
translation in order to ensure a holistic view of the eld in question:
1. Legal translation is transdisciplinary. Being an interdiscipline, legal translation does not enjoy full
autonomy as a discipline. Thus, it should capitalise on and integrate developments made within,
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 80
above all, Translation Studies, (Comparative) Law and Linguistics, to address translation-related,
conceptual and linguistic challenges in translation.
2. Legal translation is multidimensional. It should embrace the main dimensions of translations, that
is: the products (translations), the process, the participants and the context of text production and
reception (cf. Saldanha and O’Brien5 2013: 5).
3. Legal translation is bi-relational. Research should account for two fundamental intertextual
relations of translations: equivalence and textual t. As all types of translation, legal translations
are governed by two relations: the relation of equivalence, that is the relation of the target text to its
source text and, in the case of multilingual translation, to other language target texts (accuracy of
translations, multilingual mediation of legal knowledge), and the relation of textual t, that is the
relation of the target text to non-translated target-language texts of a comparable genre (naturalness
and acceptability of translations) (cf. Chesterman 2004, 2010; Biel 2014).
4. Legal translation requires multimethodological research, mixing and matching methods, in
particular through the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative approaches. While quantitative
methods can offer a “macro-perspective of the overarching trends in the world”, qualitative methods
provide “a exible and highly context-sensitive micro-perspective of the everyday realities of the
world” (Dörnyei 2007: 29).
Multiple perspectives are thus achieved through transdisciplinarity, multidimensionality, bidirectionality,
and multimethodology.
2.2 A multi-perspective research framework for legal translation
The chart below (Chart 1) proposes a multi-perspective research framework for legal translation. It shows
four dimensions of translation — the product itself and the context of production and reception, process and
participants — modelled according to key factors, components and related methods of research (the list is
non-exhaustive). They are arranged in the sequence of context, participants, process and product to account
for the where, who, how and what in legal translation.
Chart 1. A multi-perspective framework for researching legal translation: dimensions, components and methods.
5 Saldanha and O’Brien refer to them as ‘orientations’ or ‘foci’ (cf. 2013: 5).
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 81
The context of translation production and reception should account for external factors which inuence
translators (cf. Saldanha and O’Brien 2014: 205). In the case of legal translation, the wider context must cover
legal factors, such as a type of the legal systems involved (intrasystemic, intersystemic, hybrid translation),
the authoritative or non-authoritative (cf. Šarčević 1997: 21, Garzone 2000: 6) status of the target text, and the
purpose of translation — normative, informative or general legal/juridical purposes (cf. Cao 2007: 10). In the
context of quality assurance, this is referred to by Prieto Ramos as the ‘legal macro-contextualization’ of the
translation process (2015: 18). The context also encompasses institutional, political, ideological, social and
cultural factors. For example, institutional settings are of high importance in the analysis of legal translation
in international organisations, such as the EU or the United Nations (UN), which have their own institutional
cultures of translating and regulate and control translators’ behaviour (cf. Koskinen 2008). The contextual
and situational analysis is essential in qualitative approaches, such as ethnographic studies, genre analysis,
discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis (cf. Bhatia 1993: 22-36; 2004: 164-165; Baker 2010: 152);
nevertheless, it should also precede quantitative studies to establish the background for the interpretation
and evaluation of data. Bhatia’s model of applied genre analysis (1993, revised version 2004), which has
been tested extensively by him on legal discourse, includes an in-depth study of the discourse community
as part of the situational/contextual analysis. In particular, as Bhatia recommends, it is necessary to identify
the author, recipients, their relationship and goals, as well as to describe the historical, socio-cultural,
philosophical, and occupational situation of the discourse community and to conduct an ethnographic study
of its practices (2004: 164-165). These factors also apply to legal translation — what is especially important
is the identication of target text recipients, including their legal expertise, familiarity with the source text
legal system, legal knowledge gaps, degree of conceptual mediation required, and recipients’ expectancy
norms. Another layer of analysis may concern such external factors as the brief, time pressure, remuneration
and quality assurance procedures. To sum up, the contextual and situational analysis is often qualitative —
not only descriptive, but also involves a critical assessment of factors and circumstances.
The next dimension of legal translation covers various types of participants — translators, revisers and
proofreaders, as well as translation commissioners. A recent reorientation of Translation Studies towards
translators has been inspired by the sociology of translation (cf. Wolf and Fukari (eds) 2007). Research into
participants is usually done with a mix of quantitative methods (surveys) and qualitative methods (in-depth
interviews, ethnographic research, focus groups, observational research and practitioners’ individual stories).
Research on translators and other participants contributes to a clearer understanding of the translator’s
habitus and agency (cf. Simeoni 1998), that is how translators’ decisions are inuenced and constrained by
other actors or conditions. The legal translator’s habitus and agency have not been explored extensively yet,
with some exceptions — see for example Vidal Claramonte (2005) and Martín Ruano (2014). Overall, this
type of research is more popular among researchers studying legal interpreting. It is worth noting in passing
that the common ground between legal translation and legal interpreting merits more attention from scholars
working, quite separately, in these two elds.
Compared to other areas, research into the legal translation process is a terra incognita. So far experimental
and observational methods, such as eyetracking, Think Aloud Protocols, keystroke logging or fMRI, were
hardly used in the context of professional legal translation, although it should be appreciated that these methods
are still considered to be in their infancy and in need of higher rigour and standardisation (cf. Saldanha and
O’Brient 2014: 148-149). This area has to be developed in the future if we want to move beyond speculation
about cognitive processes in legal translators’ mind during the translation process and to understand how
translators process legal texts and produce their translations. Process research may also provide insight into
how translators use resources, e.g. paper versus electronic dictionaries, term bases, legislative databases,
corpora, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools or machine translation (MT) systems. This type of data
has practical implications for translation practice as it may help to improve the functionality and efciency
of such resources. Finally, process research has proven effective in understanding translators’ expertise and
competence in other types of translation (cf. Saldanha and O’Brien 2014: 109) and it should be extended
to explore experimentally how lawyers and non-lawyers translate and how novices’ performance differs
from that of professionals, providing empirical evidence for translator trainers. The interpretation of process
research ndings requires triangulation, in particular, with product-oriented research, to link performance
during the translation process with the quality of the translation product.
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 82
Finally, the bulk of legal translation research focuses on the products — translations. As already noted, one
of the key aspects of legal translation is equivalence which requires a high degree of accuracy of transfer
and a skilful mediation of legal knowledge between and within legal systems (cf. Engberg 2013). Since
legal terms are units of legal knowledge (cf. Biel 2014: 41), their rendering is often critical for establishing
equivalence between a source and target text, as well as for accuracy, which — as argued by Šarčević —
takes precedence over stylistic considerations (2000: 3). Research on legal terminology in translation is
conducted, above all, with qualitative methods borrowed from comparative law (cf. Šarčević 1997, Glanert
2011, Engberg 2013). Take for example the conceptual analysis proposed by Šarčević, which involves the
comparison of essentialia, i.e. vital characteristics of legal terms, differentiating them from accidentaliam
i.e. additional characteristics, to establish a degree of incongruity between a SL and TL term (1997: 237).
Some aspects of terms may be studied quantitatively with corpora, which will be discussed in the next
section (cf. section 3). Translations may also be studied with contrastive methods through the prism of SL
and TL conventions. Corpus methods (as well as a manual analysis of much smaller samples) are also used
to study the textual t of translations in the context of their naturalness and readability. Other studies may
involve the discursive dimension of translations, focusing in particular on genres and related issues, such
as a macrostructure and microstructure, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, etc. Recent studies evidence high
variation across (legal) genres (cf. Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011, Delaere et al. 2012, de Sutter et al. 2012);
genres6 are also an important underlying factor in the translator’s decision-making process, in particular
the selection of translation strategies and techniques (cf. Alcaraz Varó and Hughes 2002: 103). Another
aspect of translation products is their legal effects, including consequences of errors, which is studied usually
within the eld of Legal Studies. All in all, a broad spectrum of methods is necessary to account for legal,
communicative, pragmatic, cognitive and social aspects of legal translation products.
To sum up, the division into dimensions should not be viewed as clear-cut — in reality it is rather a partially
overlapping continuum or a sequence. Any research into translation products, processes and participants has
to — to some extent — account for the wider context of translation. It should be stressed that some aspects
of translations — most notably, quality— cut across all dimensions.
3 Applicability of the framework: a corpus research model
In general, methods tend to focus on one aspect while downplaying others. I will illustrate the applicability
of the framework by positioning a corpus research model7 in it to see how it interacts with the proposed
dimensions and components, specically to understand what is left out and should be supplemented with
other methods. Corpus methods have not been tested extensively on legal translation so far but have started
to enjoy increasing popularity recently (cf. Biel 2017, forthcoming, for an overview).
Compared to the standard use of corpora in Translation Studies, Chart 1 proposes an advanced corpus design
which affords a broader perspective on the phenomena identied in the corpus and eliminates methodological
shortcomings. The corpus architecture8 comprises genre-based comparable, parallel and general reference
corpora.
6 See also Borja Albi 2013 for a genre-analysis approach to researching the translation of court documents. A genre may be dened
as “a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes which are recognised by
the expert members of the parent discourse community” (Swales 1990: 58) and a “way of acting and interacting linguistically”
(Fairclough 2003: 17). Thus, genres are understood as dynamic constructs with a strong emphasis on a repeated use of relatively
stable, recognisable patterns in a particular discourse community for a specic communicative purpose to realise a social goal.
7 Corpus studies tend to be, somewhat articially, divided into corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. The former apply corpora
as a tool to test or validate pre-conceived hypotheses and theories (Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 65), taking for granted linguistic categories
proposed by linguistic theory (Biber 2013[2009]). The latter are more radical and inductive, relying on corpus data without prior
assumptions, “so that the linguistic constructs themselves emerge from analysis of a corpus” (Biber 2013[2009]: 5). This distinction
is articial to some extent — ‘overstated’ as observed by McEnery et al. (2006: 8) — since quite frequently researchers use a mix
of corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches, and it is virtually impossible to approach data without ‘any prior assumptions’. As I
share these concerns, I will use a generic term ‘corpus research model’ to account for both approaches.
8 This architecture been tested on legal translation in Biel (2014, 2016).
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 83
Chart 2. Comparable-parallel corpus architecture (ST – source text, TL – target text, ref. - reference).
The main corpus consists of the corpus of target texts (translations) which is researched against the reference
corpus of target language non translated texts of a comparable genre (a comparable corpus) designed according
to the same sampling frame (cf. McEnery and Hardie 2012: 19). The comparable corpus technique9 is quite
frequent in Translation Studies thanks to the sophistication of monolingual corpus software. It focuses
on patterns which are overrepresented and underrepresented in translations or are atypical. The use of
comparable corpora has, however, been criticised as methodologically awed due to the exclusion of source
texts (STs) from the study of translations (cf. Bernardini and Zanettin 2004: 59). It has been recommended
by a number of scholars to utilise a mixed-design architecture with another component — a bilingual parallel
corpus which comprises source texts aligned with their target texts. I refer to this type of corpus architecture
as a comparable-parallel corpus10 (cf. Biel 2016: 203). Thus, in our model, the main corpus is also studied
in relation to the corpus of source texts aligned with their target texts (a parallel corpus). It should, however,
be appreciated that parallel corpus methods still lack technical sophistication similar to that of comparable
corpora and, after extraction, data often require manual analysis. The nal component in the architecture,
borrowed from discourse studies, is a big general reference corpus, e.g. The National Corpus of Polish, to
avoid the “difference mindset” and be able to identify similarities (Baker 2010: 153). In this context, Baker
warns against over-reporting differences and under-reporting similarities (2010: 152).
As a quantitative method, corpus methodology facilitates searching for regularities and generalisability
beyond the particular context, through the systematic bottom-up identication of patterns in large, ideally
representative and balanced, collections of data. The main strength of corpus studies is their ability to explore
different types of patterns in translation as a special type of language use. Language use has been found by
corpus linguists to be highly patterned and formulaic (cf. Sinclair’s idiom principle11 1991: 101), with corpus
linguistics shifting attention from a word to recurrent repetitive patterns (Stubbs 2004: 118). Owing to their
repetitiveness, such patterns are cognitively salient and may be expected to play a facilitating role in text
comprehension.
Corpus methods can help us study a number of patterns:
(1) Legal rule as a pattern: mental patterning of legal reasoning (cf. Kjær 2000:146);
(2) Patterns in underlying source and target legal genres (generic conventions): various types of
lexico-grammatical patterns, including deontic and epistemic modality, framing (qualication)
of legal rules, rhetorical and argumentative patterns, depersonalisation of the authority, sentence
structure; logical relations between units of discourse; intra- and intertextuality/textual navigation,
cohesion, including the consistency of term use (cf. Biel 2014: 143);
9 This method was pioneered by M. Baker in early 1990s (1993).
10 Hansen-Schirra and Teich have proposed to refer to it as a multilingually comparable corpus (2009: 1162), a name which I nd
ambiguous.
11 Sinclair’s idiom principle assumes that “a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases
that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments” (1991: 110).
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 84
(3) Patterning (prefabrication) primed in translation: the intensity of SL interference and constraints
of the translation process, that is to what extent translations may overcome source language
interference and recreate natural TL patterns;
(4) Patterns in the use of terms: the collocational environment of terms (embedding of terms), a range
of equivalents for a SL term, consistency in the use of equivalents for a SL term, terminological
n-grams;
(5) Patterns in translators’ behaviour evidenced as translation universals or features of translations,
including simplication, explicitation, standardisation, exaggeration of typical target language
features, and suppression of unique items (Baker 1993; Chesterman 2004);
(6) Patterns of patterns: generalisations about legal translation and transferability of ndings to other
contexts. Generalisability “aims to establish the relevance, signicance, and external validity of
ndings for situations or people beyond the immediate research project” (Duff 2006: 67).
Thus, corpus methods are oriented at exploring predominantly the product (translations) quantitatively on
large collections of texts, and except for some aspects of the process and translators (participants) (see
pattern # 5), they are inadequate to extensively study the remaining dimensions, that is the context, the
process and translators.
In respect of the product, the corpus model is well-suited to study the textual t — the distance of translations
to non-translated legal texts of a comparable genre, their naturalness, aesthetics, readability and clarity, all of
which contribute to the communicative potential of legal translations. In particular, research into textual t
explores the intensity of SL interference and translation-induced distortions related to the constraints of the
translation process and does it on a much larger and objective scale. Despite the complex corpus architecture
proposed in the model, corpora have a limited potential to study equivalence (information transfer, accuracy),
that is the construal of legal meaning in translations against the legal meaning of the source text, which
requires the one-to-one close reading of the target text against the source text (ST). Parallel corpora may
help extract some bilingual information, which still requires qualitative analysis. As observed by Baker
(2010: 151), “A crucial stage of analysis in any corpus research involves qualitative analyses of quantitative
patterns”. Corpus methods are used to identify units for further qualitative and small-scale quantitative
analysis to shift from the macro perspective and global trends to a micro perspective with richer data.
In order to ensure a good coverage of perspectives, corpus data should be triangulated with other methods,
in particular qualitative approaches (cf. Zanettin 2012: 12), and in our case, above all, with comparative
law methods. It is also advisable to supplement corpus research with the study of the context, process and
participants.
4 Conclusions
This paper has proposed a framework for researching legal translation by modelling its key dimensions,
components and factors, and linking them to relevant research methods. All in all, a broad spectrum of
methods is necessary to account for legal, communicative, pragmatic, cognitive and social aspects of legal
translation.
It may well be difcult to apply varied methods and approaches to legal translation, and, in fact, to any
object of research, in a single study. For practical considerations, a single study would usually focus on one
or selected lines of research within the framework. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses and while
exploring extensively one aspect of language use, it may obscure other aspects. It is vital that a researcher
be aware of what is being suppressed or left out (and of the ensuing consequences). Yet, in order to obtain
a complete picture of legal translation, a researcher should aim at incorporating other components of the
framework in their successive studies. On the other hand, this problem may be overcome, at least to some
extent, if we conduct our work in transdisciplinary, multimethodological and multilingual teams. With
the growing methodological awareness and rigour in the eld, it may be expected that research into legal
Łucja Biel
Researching Legal Translation: a Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation
Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, núm. 68, 2017 85
translation will become increasingly larger in scale and more teamwork-based in order to integrate multiple
perspectives on the object of study.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the National Science Centre (NCN) under Grant 2014/14/E/HS2/00782.
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