Fernando Prieto Ramos

• PhD
• Full Professor at University of Geneva

Multi-componential models of translation competence are widely used in translator training as a yardstick for curricular and syllabus design. These models must be adapted to reflect professional trends, such as the impact of artificial intelligence, and machine translation in particular, on working methods. This paper describes the process of adapt...

The relevance of translation and law degrees as pathways to professional legal translation is the subject of persistent debate, but there is limited research on the relationship between legal translators’ backgrounds and competence levels in practice. This study compares the revision performance of several groups of institutional translators (44 in...

Building on the premises of the LETRINT project, this study shows the applicability of a corpus-based methodology to identify patterns of legal terminological decision-making and measure their quality according to translation adequacy requirements in international organizations. The comparative adequacy assessment of translations of five illustrati...

Institutional term banks (ITBs), such as Inter-Active Terminology for Europe (IATE) in the European Union (EU) institutions and UNTERM in the United Nations, are key sources for the language services of these institutions, and are also used by many other translators and language professionals. These resources are considered authoritative in the tra...

Systematic comparative analyses of the profiles and skills required to work for the translation services of international organizations remain scarce. This paper sheds light on recent institutional needs and expectations by comparing the job descriptors and requirements for translator and reviser positions in a corpus of vacancy notices published b...

The analysis of domain-specific terminology is essential for characterizing specialized discourses, and emerges as a useful means of measuring the thematic hybridity of law and legal translation in particular. This paper accordingly presents a large-scale mapping of terminological and phraseological features in a multi-genre corpus that was built a...

Despite the persistent focus on terminology in legal translation studies, to date, no large-scale research has empirically explored the difficulty of terminology in translating legal genres. Approaches to translation difficulty in translation studies more broadly remain limited in scope. To fill this gap, a study was conducted to measure the diffic...

This paper presents the main findings of a study on the translation of national court names in United Nations texts as an illustrative group of culture-bound terms. It focuses on documents produced as part of several mandatory compliance monitoring procedures in the field of human rights. The study is part of a broader project on legal translation...

Studies of institutional translation have traditionally focused on European Union (EU) institutions and legislative genres. In order to develop a more comprehensive characterization of translation at international organizations beyond EU supranational law, this study compares a full mapping of multilingual text production at EU institutions to that...

As central aspects of legal translation practice and research, legal terminology and phraseology are a prominent area of inquiry in Legal Translation Studies (LTS). This introductory paper reviews the varying conditions and challenges of dealing with conceptual incongruity in inter-systemic legal translation, on the one hand, and the implications o...

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. All contributions examine the multiple aspects of translation competence and institutional processes that can have a bearing on translation quality. Focus is placed on public institutions and administrations at the regional, national and int...

Terminological consistency and accuracy are key indicators of institutional translation quality and a condition for semantic univocity and certainty with regard to legal terms translated at international organizations. They are accordingly important guiding principles in institutional terminology management. This chapter examines variations of cons...

Effective information mining for legal terminological research in translation is largely determined by the ability to contextualize concepts in their legal framework and to resort to relevant legal sources. Specialized knowledge of these sources thus emerges as a competence marker that is expected to converge with that of comparative law practition...

From the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that the practices of naming the disease, its nature and its handling by the health authorities, the news media and the politicians had social and ideological implications. This article presents a sociosemiotic study of such practices as reflected in a corpus of headlines of eight...

This paper explores how the legal functions of international organizations condition the scope and properties of translation-mediated multilingualism as implemented in three representative settings: the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. To this end, a multi-method interdisciplinary approach is applied encompassing...

Corrigenda issued by international organizations provide a most relevant source for the analysis of translation errors and what they reveal about institutional translation quality control and correction processes. This study examines corrigenda published in three settings (the European Union institutions involved in law-making, the United Nations a...

Research in legal and institutional translation within the realm of Legal Translation Studies (LTS) has greatly benefited from embracing the advances of Corpus Linguistics in the past few decades. This paper provides an overview of corpus-based approaches in LTS and illustrates their increasing prominence and sophistication through the description...

Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring corpus design and compilation to research goals, and to ensuring the validity of research results. This is especially true when the target population of texts under examination is very large and transcends a restricted area of specialization and/or covers...

Panel at the 13 th EST Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa 9-13 September 2019 What does quality mean in legal translation and interpreting, and why does it matter? What is required of academic programmes, trainees and trainers in order to ensure effective legal translator training? What are the latest professional developments and limitations i...

As international organizations rely on translation to produce and enforce legal instruments in multiple languages, global law can be regarded as a network of translated texts. To shed light on the multilingual dimension of international and supranational law, this study presents an interdisciplinary mapping of legal genres in three representative s...

The complex variables involved in mediating between asymmetrical legal realities explain, to a great extent, the limitations of traditional terminological resources (particularly, bilingual legal dictionaries) as working tools for legal translators. After a brief review of these limitations, a new approach to the development of terminological resou...

The complex variables involved in mediating between asymmetrical legal realities explain, to a great extent, the limitations of traditional terminological resources (particularly, bilingual legal dictionaries) as working tools for legal translators. After a brief review of these limitations, a new approach to the development of terminological resou...

This paper analyses the defining features of legal translation in the development of international and supranational law, taking a comparative approach between different organisations, particularly the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the European Union and their respective adjudicative bodies. The scope and communicative conditions of...

Building on a functionalist framework for decision-making in legal translation, a holistic approach to quality is presented in order to respond to the specificities of this field and overcome the shortcomings of general models of translation quality evaluation. The proposed approach connects legal, contextual, macrotextual and microtextual variable...

This paper offers an overview of the development of Legal Translation Studies as a major interdiscipline within Translation Studies. It reviews key elements that shape its specificity and constitute the shared ground of its research community: object of study, place within academia, denomination, historical milestones and key approaches. This revie...

This paper presents a model for decision-making in legal translation in which the definition of legal communicative parameters determines the role of translation itself and the conditions for adequacy in each situation. It is argued that translation-oriented legal lexicography must take account of such parameters in order to be effective. In the ca...

Building on previous holistic multicomponent paradigms of translation macrocompetence, a legal translation competence model is presented which avoids certain conceptual duplications in the light of professional practice, and incorporates distinctive legal thematic elements. Beyond component description, it is argued that the integral development of...

Ascertaining the current state of the law is a basic challenge for any lawyer. This - of course - is well appreciated by legal indexers, whose work provides key tools allowing researchers to move efficiently through the material relevant to an issue. In developed and well settled areas of the law, legal research tasks may be completed with relative...

This paper reports a project aimed at the development of critical media literacy and language awareness by a group of Irish university students through the application of critical discourse analysis (CDA) tools in their Spanish language class. The participants were assigned various reading activities in which they had to reflect on the social repre...