Researching Legal Translation: A multi-perspective and mixed-method framework for legal translation

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to propose a multi-perspective and multi-method research framework for legal translation by modelling key dimensions and factors applicable to legal translation. As a result of the ongoing expansion of Legal Translation Studies, the field is experiencing a methodological development, which extends our perspective on legal translation. The paper proposes four postulates for the multi-perspective framework for researching legal translation — namely, transdisciplinarity, multidimensionality, bidirectionality, and multimethodology. The multi-perspective research framework for legal translation embraces a continuum of four key dimensions of translation — the product itself, the context of production and reception, process and participants, modelled according to their dominant factors, components and related methods of research. The second part of the paper investigates, by way of illustration, how corpus methods interact with the above proposed multi-perspective framework. In the conclusions it is argued that research into legal translation may be expected to become increasingly larger in scale and more teamwork-based in order to bring in multiple perspectives on the object of study.

Keywords

• Legal translation
• research framework
• triangulation
• mixed methods.