Session

Will machine translation be able to replace human translators in the domain of law? Will machine translated texts be so good that post-editing will be sufficient?

Legal texts generally represent an utterly complex reality of facts and norms, which is inevitably reflected in legal language. In addition, legal communication has a traditional and conventional character, which varies depending on each legal language. This does not necessarily foster the comprehensibility of legal texts. Legal texts cannot be understood – let alone translated –  without knowing their function and their historical dimension that determines the respective convention and without knowing how legal experts think and work.

How much of these knowledge requirements will the machine translation systems be able to fulfil in the future, given the constant evolution of artificial intelligence? How error-prone will they remain? What will the job profile of the legal translator become like? We will address these questions starting from Italian legal texts to be translated into German. We will discuss existing challenges considering the special features of legal translation, the specific characteristics of different texts and languages, translation problems and difficulties. We will also compare the human translation of the texts with the translations produced by various machine translation systems.

The course is aimed at anyone who drafts and/or translates texts professionally. It is also aimed at students of translation and law.