Teaching English for Legal Purposes to Undergraduate Translation Majors

Abstract

To enable students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation to read, identify the lexical and syntactic features of legal documents and hence comprehend their content, this article proposes an instructional module for teaching English for Legal Purposes (ELP). The module should be based on the assessment of the students’ proficiency level in English and analysis of their academic and professional need. It consists of the most common legal terms such as (alias, amicus, peosequi, res judicata, puisine, puis ne, estoppel fee, simple laches, quash); grammatical structures common in legal documents such as the use of long and complex sentences, conditional clauses, adverbial clusters, long complicated nominal groups, the modal auxiliary shall, and French word order (court martial, heir apparent, secretary general); reading legal documents such as insurance policies, wills, statutes, contracts and agreements between individuals, leases, petitions, investigations...etc. Global legal themes are integrated in the practice material. The students practice listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation.  They learn the legal terms and grammatical structures in context (through the text). The instructor performs text analysis. Together with the students, she goes through a legal text, locates legal terms and syntactic structures, and explains and/or translates them. Then the students perform text analysis of new legal texts. Numerous technologies can be integrated into teaching and learning ELP. Assignments are posted on Blackboard LMS, a blog or a social media page. At the end of the instructional period, the students are tested, and the ELP module is evaluated by the students and legal translation instructors.  The article recommends that ELP be student-centered. The students should have an active role in the learning process where they select legal topics to read, talk, write about and translate.