INTEGRATED UNIVERSITY-BASED TRAINING TO ENHANCE LAWYERS-TO-BE SKILLS IN MULTILINGUAL DOCUMENTS DRAFTING AND TRANSLATION

The paper aims to use interdisciplinary theoretical background to explore didactic features for teachers and students who engage in teaching/learning university-based course on legal documents drafting and translation. The paper sets forth the hypothesis statement which argues that students make a more solid academic progress when a foreign language based legal documents drafting and translation is put on the curriculum agenda as a separate foreign language course and supported by a specific set of materials. The analysis is conducted with the view to replying the research questions on major trends in academic research on the topic under study, and on factors that reveal advantages of empirical training that focuses specifically on a foreign language-based legal documents drafting and translation, as well. The research methodology combined theoretical study of academic sources and empirical studies that included the design of an experimental course on a foreign language-based legal drafting and translation, and experimental training of students on the above course, in comparison with students who were subject to standard training on a traditional materials for legal language training with tasks for drafting and translation. The Moscow-based (Russia) RUDN Law Institute students took part in the experimental training. The academic streaming principle was used to divide students into the groups of standard and experimental training. The differences with regard to outcomes of standard and experimental training were revealed through the marks that students from experimental and standard training groups got, and the percentage of errors the students committed.