Abstract:

As is known, legal translation is of particular importance today in the European Union with the piles of its legal documents written by the majority of its authorities and to be translated into 28 languages of the European Union member countries. That’s why legal translation training and its efficiency is a key issue for the European Commission’s and other European authorities’ seamless functioning, as well as that of the national governments.
The authors raise the question of what is more efficient – to teach translation to law students or law to translation students to develop better legal translators and share their professional experience and achievements to prove their opinions.

Systems approach successfully used in many spheres of human activity, including national economies and sciences is considered to be an efficient tool to develop an integral system of professional training and the authors believe that it can be successfully used for legal translation training. The authors identify the advantages of systems approach and tackle the legal translation training as a system aimed at developing legal translators as high level professionals able to continue their self-development on the basis of life-long learning principles. The systems approach also allows the authors identifying the connections between legal translation as a profession and its outer environment, as well as legal translation training as a system with its interconnections with the other training systems preceding and succeeding it.

The authors also advocate for Jose Ortega-i-Gasset’s principle of economy stating that the volume of information to be given to legal translation students should depend on the purposes of legal translation training – whether future legal translators are to work as ‘certificate translators’ or ‘instructions translators’ or ‘statute translators’.

The presentation considers several models of legal translation training including the model developed by Dr Kosareva at the law faculty of the National Research University ‘Higher School of Economics’ and the models developed by Dr Burukina at the translation faculty and at the law faculty of the Moscow State Linguistic University.

Keywords:

Systems approach, applied higher education, legal translation in the European Union, legal translation training.