ABSTRACT
Legal translation and interpreting is a strongly expanding field both as an area of practice and as an area of research. At the level of practice, the volumes of legal translated texts have increased exponentially at international organisations, in public services and in the private sector in recent years. At the level of research, studies on legal translation have proliferated during the past three decades and have gradually problematised their object of study. In any event, as part of its development into an independent branch of Translation Studies (TS), legal translation calls for further “methodological eclectism and triangulation, as well as further integration along the interdisciplinary lines” (Biel and Engberg 2013, p. 1), i.e. for research that might cross boundaries across approaches and disciplines in order to shed light on the many facets of this complex social practice. The proposed volume precisely addresses the challenge of consolidation, triangulation and methodological refinement. The contributions to the volume both stand as examples of the variety of theoretical approaches which have been developed in the discipline and of the methodological sophistication which is currently being called for. In this regard, by combining different perspectives, they expand our understanding of the role(s) played by legal translators and interpreters, who emerge as linguistic and intercultural mediators dealing with a rich variety of legal texts; as knowledge communicators and as builders of specialised knowledge; as social agents performing a socially situated activity; as decision-makers and agents subject to and redefining power relations; and as political actors shaping (legal) cultures and negotiating cultural identities, as well as their own professional identity.
This volume was inspired by the panel Crossing and moving boundaries in legal translation and interpreting organised by the editors at the 8th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies at the University of Aarhus in Denmark in September 2016. We invited selected speakers to write contributions for a book focusing on research methods and we extended an invitation to renowned scholars who lead innovative research projects to ensure a comprehensive coverage of dominant methods in the field.
