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Esther Monzó Nebot teaches legal translation in the Department of Translation and Communication at University Jaume I of Castelló in Spain. After finishing her degree in Translation and Interpreting in 1998, she taught Catalan, Spanish and Translation at the University of Cambridge (UK). She became a certified translator and interpreter in 1999 and completed her PhD studies in translation at University Jaume I while freelancing as a legal and technical translator. In her PhD Dissertation she studied the legal translator in the Spanish context from a sociological perspective. She coordinates the research team Gitrad (www.gitrad.uji.es) and directs the Active project (www.active.uji.es). She is also a founding member of the Lextra study network (www.lextra.uji.es), a group of scholars and professionals interested in the study of translation and the law. Her E-mail address is monzo@trad.uji.es.

Abstract

This contribution presents the design, development and results of several projects implemented between 1999 and 2003 with groups of students who were enrolled in legal translation courses at the Universitat Jaume I (Castello, Spain). I will explain how face-to-face classes were combined with activities carried out and tutored in virtual environments and then present the data collected by monitoring the classes, from the reports generated from the different environments used, and from the questionnaires administered to the students taking part in the projects. I will describe how we evolved from a first basic project with the WWW, which involved designing a legal translation portal (URL www.gitrad.uji.es), consisting of traditional web pages. The scheme was tested with a small group of students and then given the go-ahead and extended to all legal translation courses in the degree. The following year, this more common environment was combined with BSCW in order to introduce new ways of interacting with students and to enhance cooperative tasks. After detecting several drawbacks in this new model, the virtual environment and the face-to-face classes were complemented by compulsory tutorial sessions and extracurricular technological training. Thanks to the acquisition of WebCT licences by the Universitat Jaume I, it became possible to introduce a new combination of environments in this mixed model of teaching. Reducing the numbers of students in the groups taking part in this new project (2003-2004) enabled us to carry out a personalised control of the value and real use of the tool in learning and teaching. Finally, a new environment (Moodle) has been adopted by the University in 2004-2005, forcing us to change again the dynamics and materials used in the classes. This instability, however, has given us the chance to reflect on what best serves the aims of a technology enhanced legal translation course.

Introduction

The process of teaching and learning legal translation to undergraduate students is usually impaired by one special feature: students have no knowledge whatsoever of the field they have to translate nor do they have any idea what law or legal translation is. The limited extent to which Law is popularised in society and the relatively scarce mentions it gets in the mass media grant us the opportunity to do away with a large number of prejudices, misconceptions, etc. before starting work. Yet, this fact involves a great deal of disadvantages both for trainers and trainees. Because of their age, these students have never had to come into contact with the legal formalities that are going to bewilder them a few years into the future. For the same reason, they haven't usually needed to have any foreign qualifications recognised or to register a citizen from another country. Consequently, when they begin the degree course, the contents of the syllabus are as unknown to them as they are boring and, apparently, difficult. The thing is that the students' having no idea of Law when classes start will indeed have repercussions in how they face the course. Having to learn many things about the topic and getting used to new sources of information in just three semesters is a daunting task. However, thanks to that effort, a better understanding of the day-to-day social reality we live in can be gained and this newfound literacy in that subject matter can enable students to enjoy many personal and professional satisfactions. The question is, if the result is so rewarding, why does getting there have to be so unpleasant?

During the three semesters I myself attended legal translation subjects at the University, I had to seek out a vast amount of information from a great variety of sources. That meant a lot of work gathering sources and then choosing the ones that could make the job of assimilating law more appealing to me. Fortunately, it was a time when online resources had already started to become widely available and in which the Internet opened up a whole new range of possibilities in that sense. From all that information I built up a large collection of materials. Shortly afterwards, I had the chance to begin conducting research into legal translation and I started working with members of the teaching staff at the Universitat Jaume I, more particularly, with Dr. Anabel Borja. One of the projects we were most enthusiastic about was the idea of making both all those resources and the electronic corpus Dr. Borja had been compiling for some time (together with any other material we might create or find in the future) available to anyone who was interested in legal translation. That was how we brought into being a support tool that has gone on developing and growing relentlessly ever since and which we, perhaps somewhat pretentiously, decided to call the Legal Translator's Website (URL www.gitrad.uji.es). Just a few weeks after the website was launched, the impact it was having made us aware of how attractive this tool was and we immediately decided to look for a way to make use of it in the classroom. Thus, from what started out almost as a pastime, we have gradually built up an aid that has given excellent results in the technology enhanced (that is to say, partly online and partly face-to-face) training of legal translation.

The Beginnings: A Documentary Tool on the WWW

The Legal Translator's Website (GITRAD) was presented as a place for recycling, that is, an open space that was to generate a varied range of resources that could make the legal translator's professional practice easier and make them available to everyone. At the same time it would provide a common space that could be shared by both professional and apprentice translators of this specialised field. After a fairly shallow analysis of what was needed by different translation situations, we drew up a preliminary list of the resources that could satisfy those needs and then designed a website that was launched during the academic year 1999-2000. Obviously, these design phases have been repeated periodically in an attempt to improve the materials on offer. In those early days, however, the resources were set out in three main sections that included several different subsections, as will be explained below.

Academic Information Section
In this first section students could see the career stream that the University offers future legal translators, have access to the syllabi of the specialised subjects and get in touch with their teachers by email. They could also find out about complementary training activities (workshops, seminaries, conferences, and so on).

Documentary Section
Here we offered all sorts of resources structured following a number of publications about information science and translation and about information science and law (Maciá 1998, Pinto and Cordón 1999). We wanted to organise the information that was online, the material that we had already prepared and that we were going to prepare, and then put it all together at different levels of complexity. The data was then distributed in a contrastive fashion to allow users to obtain a comparative vision of Law and legal language in the main languages of the website (English, Catalan1 and Spanish).

An important section here was that devoted to bibliography, where students could access a list of bibliographical references organised by subject matter which later included access to full texts we obtained from different authors. In this way we gradually built up a virtual library containing documents about a wide range of topics related to legal translation, language and legal systems.

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