Challenges & Solutions in Legal Translation Training: Translator Trainees’ Perspectives

Legal documents are prevalent in every aspect of our lives, from terms and conditions to marriage contracts. In the globalized and technologically advanced setting, the role of legal translators has become critical. Consequently, it is essential for legal translation trainers to understand the challenges faced by their students. This will enable trainers to provide appropriate solutions that will help streamline future translation careers. This study sought to investigate the challenges encountered by legal translator trainees when working with legal texts and understand the strategies they employed to overcome these obstacles. The reflective essays of 57 undergraduate students enrolled in an English-Arabic legal translation course were analyzed thematically to uncover the challenges and solutions from the students’ perspectives. The results showed that the major challenges faced by students were legal terminology and complex sentence structures. The solutions used by students were practice, exposure to legal content, and the use of a portfolio. Understanding the challenges of legal translation and available solutions from a student’s perspective is expected to inform legal translation training and better equip legal translation trainers with tools to assist their trainees in their translation careers.