Abstract:

There is growing consensus and widely held belief that the future of education is the cloud (1). There has been much interest recently in Google Apps use for foreign language learning, though nothing has been said about clouding technologies potential either for translation skills training or research skills development. Our investigation had two goals. First we confined our attention to clouding technologies integration into the legal translation skills training. Second, the investigation addressed the issues of cloud –based approach to develop legal translators’ research competence. The investigation has combined the two above mentioned trends as the author’s teaching experience in the field of university-based legal translators’ training proves that legal translation requires comprehensive comparative analysis of source and target legal cultures and languages units with the goal to find functional equivalents. The above analysis, in turn, often includes extended translation commentaries, notes, and explanations as translation tools. In other words, interdisciplinary research focus on language and law concepts is often a must to provide adequate translation and meet the legal translation quality requirements.

The report will describe the experiment dealing with traditional legal translation classroom and cloud-based legal translators’ training. The experiment has revealed that the major differences primarily concern the nature of learning activities, the students’ efficiency in terms of translation process and the quality of students’ translation products. The report will provide a detailed account of experimental data concerning the advantages of cloud-based legal translation competence development in terms of team work management, revising and editing skills, meeting the individual client or corporate culture requirements, time management, interaction with the client, etc.

Particular attention has been drawn to clouding technologies potential regarding the ways to overcoming barriers to translation skills training. The experiment revealed that barriers might include psychosocial factors, social background, age, different learning styles, ethnicity, etc. The report will suggest ways to overcome the above mentioned barriers by using cloud-based training.It is relevant to observe that the experiment revealed a clear difference between the quality of legal translation-related research that was conducted by the students, who were engaged in cloud-based training and those who preferred the traditional classroom based learning style. The difference concerned such quality research standards as encompassing all aspects of study, the match between the methods and questions, selection of subjects, measurement of outcomes, protection against bias, relevant sources coverage, balanced and objective approach to the research, appropriate and reliable conceptualization and measurement of variables, alternative variants and explanations evaluation, legal translation-related research submission for peer-reviewing, etc. (2).

References:
[1] Britland M., (2013) What is the future of technology in education? – URL: http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/jun/19/technology-future-education-cloud-social-learning (retrieved 1/03/2014)
[2] What Are the Standards for Quality Research? - URL: http://www.ktdrr.org/ktlibrary/articles_pubs/ncddrwork/focus/focus9/Focus9.pdf (retrieved 1/03/2014)

Keywords:

Legal translation skills training, cloud based legal translation training, cloud-based research skills development.