EMPIRICAL RESEARCH INTO CHALLENGES OF TRANSLATING LEGAL TEXTS FOR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS

Abstract

In the era of global integration, legal professionals currently have to be armed with comprehensive knowledge of different legal jurisdictions. English legal characteristics create significant obstacles in understanding equivalent meanings of legal normative documents, so translation skills are thought to be essential for legal professionals. For the purpose of training current and future legal translators, this study aimed to investigate the difficulties legal English major students might encounter when translating legal documents. The descriptive cross-sectional study employed a mixed-methods approach to examine 151 legal English major students in two courses – K45 & K46 – at Hanoi Law University during the first term of the 2023-2024 academic year. The research results indicate that the main difficulties legal English students face when translating legal texts were mainly due to the lexical characteristics of legal English but not legal English writing styles. To address this problem, legal English students should develop their learning autonomy by either intaking some effective legal English translation techniques which are given in the translated legal normative documents or using information technology, especially utilising Internet resources for broadening their knowledge about source and target laws equivalently.