Legal corpora: A trial lesson with translators and lawyers

Legal translators are often confronted with the peculiarities of legal writing, especially if they have undergone little training in legal matters (Bhatia, 1997; Tiersma, 1999; Williams, 2011). At the same time, both novice and experienced lawyers may find it difficult to understand legal texts in a second language due to linguistic shortcomings. This paper aims at exploring if second language professionals, scholars and students can learn the genre of the law through the medium of online specialized corpora. A trial lesson was given to 8 participants (4 translators, 1 academic student, and 3 lawyers) who attended a 3-hour workshop and were introduced to online legal corpora. This paper shows that the Internet is a rich source of free legal corpora which can be used for linguistic and translation purposes. It is concluded that professionals, scholars, and students can be trained to acquire the technological skills which will help them overcome the linguistic intricacies of the language of law.