256 / 2018-04-15 23:06:31

Standards in Developing Legal Translation Assessments

standard,legal translation,assessment,competence

全体主题 > Standards in developing language assessments

In recent years, driven by Belt and Road's strategy, China's foreign trade and cultural exchanges have been steadily increasing, and the translation market has been expanded and become more specialized. For example, in the field of legal translation, there is an urgent demand for legal translation talents. The training and assessment in this regard must be more standardized to meet the needs of professionalization of legal translation.

However, there is no uniform standard on how to measure students' or professionals’ legal translation competence. Legal translation talents are more professional than general translation talents, and they need to have comprehensive legal as well as linguistic knowledge background. Therefore, the main significance of this project is to define construct of legal translation competence and to provide reference standards for assessment of legal translation competence.

There are several steps of conducting the project. First, construct the legal translation competence framework which encompasses mainly linguistic competences, legal competences and personal competences, etc. In legal translation, the ability to translate legal terms is determined not only by bilingual language competence, but also by the relevant knowledge background of different legal systems. The establishment of legal translation competence framework will play a guiding role in the training process of legal translation talents. Second, construct the evaluation standards of legal translation competence. Language assessment content and methods cannot suffice the need to carry out translation assessment. Translation assessment should have its own content and methods that are independent and beyond language assessment; hence legal translation assessment is not exceptional. The construction of standards in developing legal translation assessment derives from and compensates the legal translation competence framework. Third, according to the legal translation competence framework and evaluation standards, we shall also build the legal translation test question bank. This test question bank will be used to evaluate the legal translation competence of MTIs (Master of Translation and Interpreting) at East China University of Political Science and Law. On the other hand, the data collected from the tests in this regard will help validate the test question bank.

On the whole, standards in developing legal translation assessment aims at optimizing training of legal translation talents by scientifically and objectively evaluating their legal translation competence.