An Empirical Study of Chinese Postgraduates’ Legal Translation Competence for Top-tier Legal Translators Training and Education

Legal translation is in great demand in the market, especially under the backgroundof globalization. While many legislative texts, legal documents and judicial communications need to be translated for mutual learning and understanding of different legal systems, legal translators need to take the challenge of developing specific legal translation competences. The objectives of the study are to investigate the essential skills or competences of translators currently required by legal translation market, to analyze the existing problems of talent cultivation in legal translation education in China, especially on postgraduate level, and to offer feasible suggestions about developing excellent legal translator postgraduates to universities and institutes who are dedicated to legal professionals training programs. The study combines an empirical method and a qualitative approach such as questionnaire and interview to understand the present legal translation market and current talents-developing situation in China.
The study reports on questionnaire results for discovering the necessary legal translation competences of apprentice professionals expected from the market and clients. It also reports on legal translation performance of translator trainees who are now participating in academic training programs carried out principally by universities and other institutions of higher education. It finds that there is still much room for improvements in students’ legal translation competence. The students we trained in legal translation class are not always the perfect practitioners desired in legal translation market because of insufficient translation competence. In order to eliminate the mismatch between workplace and campus for senior legal translation talent development in China, it suggests building up co-training program by workplace and university to bridge the need of the market with legal translators’ education. Universities should increase the proportion of law-related courses and compulsory courses about intercultural communication and translation technology. Translation societies should set up unified competence standards and independent proficiency tests for legal translation. And parties involving in legal translation should be united to build up libraries of legal translation resources for legal translator training and practice.