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Another section offered students information about the official exams that lead to the qualifications required to be an official translator in Catalan (Autonomous Government of Catalonia) or in Spanish (Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The website also had a directory of professional official and legal translators which included a list of teachers giving this subject in different universities and also information about professionals who agreed to collaborate with the website. Lastly, we added a link to the database of the register of official translators and interpreters at the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the Autonomous Government of Catalonia.

The next section was devoted to specialised glossaries. One of the tasks that the legal translator has to perform most frequently is terminology research. In order to make this work easier, we included legal glossaries in several languages available on the Internet, glossaries elaborated by the author or provided by other students, and also the terminological registers that were being created by our research group. The last area of this section consisted of a corpus of original and translated legal documents, which were organised by legal systems, branches of law, textual genres and languages. This parallel corpus (URL www.cdj.uji.es) was designed so as to make it possible to consult the original and translated versions of legal texts at the same time (Monzó, 2003).

The following subsections constituted what we called the interactive section. Here, firstly, there was a newsgroup (which has since disappeared) where we hoped that students would discuss the problems they might have with legal translation with other students or with any professionals who wished to collaborate. Also a notice board was used to post information about job offers and requests, reviews, and new publications. Finally, the last subsection enabled users of the website to contact us to comment on anything they found was missing from the site or any other matters concerning the contents on offer.

This website was used in class during the academic year 1999-2000 with specific practical activities involving case studies. A translation case was proposed and students had to use the website to access sources of information while also using other programs available in the translation laboratory. In this way students became more familiar with the Legal Translator's Website, which, according to the records of visits per day, was very popular with our students and those from other universities, as well as with professionals in the sector, some of whom were regularly in touch with the research group. This quickly led us to think of ways to make better use of the website in legal translation classes and to periodically renew the contents, which has meant that at present some subsections have been discarded and replaced by others. The current structure of the website can be seen on its home page:

As can be seen, we have included a subsection about the GITRAD group, a subsection about research in legal translation and the possibility of registering as a member of our virtual community.

The WWW Enters the Classroom: A Hybrid Environment
Given the success and appeal of the website among students, the research group (called GITRAD after the domain it was assigned by the university Computing Service - www.gitrad.uji.es) decided to give it a more active role in the teaching activities carried out in the classroom. The fundamental aim was to make legal translation more appealing to students, who usually see this course as highly difficult. It should be pointed out here that in the beginning (academic year 1998-1999) the author's knowledge of how to create computer resources was quite limited, as were the chances of engaging multimedia production services, and the technical means available at that time did not allow those of us with a restricted knowledge of programming to develop websites to the same extent they do nowadays. As these conditions evolved, our objectives and the educational improvements had to be fitted to the technological tools that became available.

Another noteworthy objective was to make use of the online resources that began to flourish and which constituted an easy-to-access, quick look-up library that could be used in the classroom with the right equipment, which in fact was already available in the Translation Laboratory in our Department. This environment would enable us to introduce specific tools for translators with which to create new resources that could, in turn, be made available to a wider public through the website.

On the other hand, our intention was to improve the traditional classes so that the students not only felt more motivated by the subjects but also assimilated the contents of the course more easily. In addition, I wanted to take advantage of the potential for self-evaluation offered by multimedia material I had already experienced in other contexts (for example with the HotPotatoes software) and be able to reach learners in a wider variety of environments, such as during their stays abroad as exchange students.

Therefore, the subject needed to be re-engineered to allow us to train students in the new technologies, familiarise them with a career that is becoming more and more technologised and enhance performance not only in the academic subject of legal translation but in all those that make up the course of studies in the degree of Translation and Interpreting. At the same time, it had to allow us to improve students' capabilities in their professional practice, prepare them to work in an international market and help them mature as citizens of a technological society by making them look at the new technologies with a critical eye. We had to make the existing system advance by reorganising it and introducing modifications so that it allowed for the new objectives. In consequence, in the academic year 2000-2001, we conducted a new needs analysis and designed a new solution.

In that academic year we began to offer online the materials of the course. The website hosted the contents which were developed in the classroom (tasks, documents to translate, notes, slides to follow lectures…), posted the grades obtained in the exercises, and introduced communication tools so that the students may address the trainer online. This project was first piloted with the legal translation group working from English to Catalan. Because of its bilingual context, the University Jaume I offers students the possibility to study two languages, Catalan and Spanish, as mother tongues. Students will chose one of these as their A1 language (first mother tongue), and the other will be their A2 language (second mother tongue). Catalan being a minorized language in our region, most students chose Spanish as their A1 language. As a consequence, those students who chose Catalan as A1 language will share a short of advantageous milieu in translation classes with 15 to 20 students, as compared to their classmates who have chosen Spanish as A1, who attend classes with 60 to 70 students. The Catalan A1 group was chosen because of its size (17 students in the third year at the time), which would allow to evaluate the changes before exporting the project to a larger group.

In the classes we combined sessions in conventional classrooms with others in the translation laboratory, where, through our website, students accessed explanations in HTML, PowerPoint presentations, texts in Word format, and exercises in HTML and JAVA script, among others. The answers to questionnaires that were not self-evaluating, translation exercises and other tasks such as estimates or bills had to be submitted by email so that the teacher could correct and post them on the website with any comments that might accompany them. The experience was well received by students, but there were a number of methodological and technological shortcomings. For example, we noticed important differences between the performances of some students, which could be accounted for by the fact that some of them were adopting an individualistic approach to participation, although many of the case studies were set out as work to be done in teams. The comfort to work with online materials had driven them to a quite passive attitude towards the course. This pushed me to look for a way of intensifying the role of the teams not only in the classroom but also in the tasks that had to be performed outside it and which, I hoped, would foster peer learning and a greater degree of integration among all the members of the class.

Yet, to do so would mean increasing students' chances of interaction through the learning environment, since their participation in this environment was at that time mediated by the teacher. Communication, which was done by email but always asynchronously, needed speeding up. Some tasks, which involved downloading files, working on them and then sending them back to the teacher, who eventually posted them on the site, had to be made simpler and quicker. In an attempt to promote cooperation among students, we offered them a public forum, GITRAD, which they did not find was suited to communicating with each other about matters concerning specific tasks. In order to put this situation to rights, we took the objectives we had set out while this first project was being implemented, and which could not be fulfilled with the means we had available to us, over to the Universitat Jaume I's Centre for Education and New Technologies (CENT), which was set up towards the end of 2000. What we wanted and were asking the professionals from the Centre to help us achieve with our technology were the following:

to increase the autonomy of students and work teams with respect to the teacher;
to grant students a higher degree of flexibility in their participation (time limits, independence from the tasks performed by others);
to allow fluent communication not only with the teacher but also with other learners;
to enable students to play a more important role in the materials offered, and in relation to this,
not to increase the workload on students to an excessive extent by adding different tools and environments that implement different technologies.