MET workshops

Getting started in legal translation

The landscape is becoming increasingly perilous for generalist language professionals and many are now pursuing a more specialized career. Of all possible specialisms, legal translation is an excellent option because it is in high demand. Unfortunately, legal texts are rife with complexities and pitfalls – yet this is exactly what makes legal translation a solid choice if you want to stay resilient. This workshop will set out the main difficulties we encounter when working with legal texts and some common strategies to resolve them.

Facilitator: Rebecca Porwit

Purpose: To satisfy participants’ curiosity about legal translation, help them decide if this specialism is for them and offer some strategies for overcoming its challenges.

Description: We’ll start the workshop with a poll to see how familiar participants are with legal translation, and a five-minute individual exercise to ascertain what they find intimidating about it and why they want to specialize. Then we’ll look at current trends in the language industry, such as the rise of AI and increased market concentration. This will help us to identify the advantages of specializing and the reasons why legal translation is especially attractive. Next, we’ll explore what’s involved in legal translation: the main niches, types of texts and clients. We will examine ways of overcoming some of the challenges involved in legal texts, such as specialized terminology, moving between legal systems, false friends, archaic language and legal liability. Finally, we will discuss possible paths to specialization before closing the session with Q&A. 

Participant profile: Language professionals who are thinking of specializing in legal translation or editing, or have dabbled in this area and are looking for tips to pursue it more confidently. My practical examples will be mostly Spanish-English, but the takeaways should be applicable to any language pair. 

Outcome: A clear-eyed view of what legal translation entails and whether it’s a career path you’d be interested in pursuing. 

Preparation: No preparation needed.

About the facilitator: Rebecca Porwit translates and edits legal, financial and academic texts. She went freelance in 2018 and has been working with Traducción Jurídica as a tutor on their legal and financial translation courses since 2020.