Abstract:

The report is supposed to focus on the multilingual training methodology for lawyers –to-be. Traditionally law students either have a foreign language course as a compulsory subject or can chose it as an optional one. It seems not to be enough for the EU environment as multilingualism is one of the founding principles of the EU institutions. The EU encourages everyone to learn languages as such an ability contributes to mutual understanding and cross cultural cooperation. As far as European lawyers are concerned they need skills to work effectively with representatives of different national cultures, and they need skills to work with official EU documents. There is a number of textbooks that are used across the EU Universities for training Legal English, or Legal Spanish, for instance. Nevertheless there are challenges as far as the foreign language training of lawyers-to-be is concerned.
First, that there are few legal language training materials that are designed on a comparative background. Second, legal language teaching materials in printed textbooks aim at covering the main branches of Law within a concrete national legal culture with no focus on EU legal peculiarities. Third, not every EU document is translated in all 23 EU official languages. And lawyers who work within the EU legal environment have to use translation tools to translate some EU documents for their research and everyday practice. Thus students who study Law at European Universities have to be taught to use such tools, as well.
What concerns Russian students who study International and EU Law they are supposed to learn at least two foreign languages: English, and French, German, or Spanish. Such a requirement is a must as many EU documents of current importance are not translated into Russian. To improve students’ specialized language training with regard to EU multilingual legal environment the Foreign Languages Department of The Law Faculty of Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia started an experimental course that was designed to improve students’ multilingual skills with regard to EU legal environment.
The course design methodology grounded on the competence-based cross disciplinary educational paradigm and combined a learner-centered approach, EU context based learning, task centered rather than text oriented goals, case- study of original and translated text versions, blended learning environment, ICT tools to process and manage language versions of the documents under study. The course included teaching materials in two foreign languages (English and French) with equal workload of English and French lessons that were balanced and coordinated in regard to topics and language and translation skills training tasks.
Each English and French lesson included assignments, that were aimed at training students’ skills to work with EU Directorate General for Translation ICT tools and computer-assisted translation technologies (terminology managers and databases, concordances, bitexts, translation memory managers, project management software).
The experimental teaching proved the course was an effective tool to create a multilingual educational environment for lawyers-to-be.

Keywords:

Foreign language training, multilingual education, computer-assisted multilingual training.