Machine translation literacy in the legal translation context: a SWOT analysis perspective

Abstract

In the past couple of decades, machine translation (MT), whether phrase-based statistical or neural MT, has made considerable progress and has become increasingly common in specialised translation workflows. More studies on MT in legal contexts have been conducted in the past several years, and MT has been and continues to be used in international and supranational institutions that rely on legal translation and whose voluminous collections of translated text have been used to train contemporary systems. The time is ripe for a synthesis of developments in the area that may reinforce our understanding of what we might expect from MT from the perspective of legal translators. This systematic review of legal translation and MT studies teases out potential strengths/weaknesses of MT and opportunities/threats of using it from a legal translator perspective, focusing on lexical and morphosyntactic challenges that may set legal translation apart from other specialised translation areas. A SWOT analysis from this perspective may offer value as a pedagogical framework for fostering domain-specific MT literacy in the legal translation classroom. Students will develop an understanding of what might reasonably be expected from MT in legal translation contexts, while reinforcing their understanding of legal translation challenges.

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