TRANSLATION STRATEGIES IN ONLINE LEGAL ENGLISH TEACHING

The paper is an attempt to organise considerations related to using three translation strategies in legal English teaching at the higher education level. The advantages and limitations of three relatively effective legal translation strategies (pragmatic communicative translation, foreignization, domestication) are described. As part of the study, the author summarises the results of semi-structured interviews and anonymous surveys of five groups of students whose legal translation proficiency was tested using authentic legal documents. It is assumed that online teaching of these strategies to students might improve the students' quality of Russian-English legal translation. The research rationale of the sociological survey consisted of the following procedures. Initially, the author collected samples of students' translations of authentic texts that contained the three types of prevalent terminological and grammar mistakes resulting from the wrong choice of translation strategy. Later the students were anonymously asked to assess the relative effectiveness of the suggested combination of translation strategies and their applicability to the seven types of authentic common law documents. The corpus of students' work comprised about 80,000 words and was then analysed using the elements of linguistic statistics to reveal the frequency of the most common translation mistakes per 1000 words. The study aims to show how the regular classroom work on translation tasks requiring the three translation strategies of authentic source texts helps accelerate and enhance legal English translation skills and sub-skills. The end goal was to show how to implement the strategies in the existing curricula as learning tools to improve the quality of direct and reverse Russian-English translation. Despite the recent progress in machine translation algorithms, the output of translation software still requires editing and post-translation analysis. An adequacy standard would be that the lawyers from the target language jurisdiction would grasp the meaning of an authentic document without ambiguity or distortion of meaning. This paper then explores the theoretical elements of translation studies that may be included in a standard legal English course, researches how to implement the three basic translation strategies within the task-based approach to second language acquisition and assesses the applicability of the strategies in an online classroom.