A Critical Comparative Analysis of Online Tools for Legal Translators

In the current fast-pacing digital world, legal translators are often confronted with a vast array of online resources that they can hardly use or understand. This paper is aimed to outline some of the pitfalls arising from the Internet and the shortcomings of some online tools. In particular, it will analyse and compare online dictionaries, fora, institutional and professional monolingual websites. In this way, light will be shed on how an online search of legal terms (or better, equivalents) can be time-consuming and, sometimes, misleading. The usefulness of aligned bilingual corpora will hence be pinned down, providing that the texts composing the corpora are reliable. This paper will claim that without a proper training on how to use corpora, and on how to select the overwhelming information available on the Internet, both professional and inexperienced translators may have difficulties in finding suitable legal equivalents. Therefore, it will be argued that along with a linguistic and legal training, translators should be taught how to skim the information they find online. Finally, a call for major interventions at the level of EU language databases will be urged, given the wide spectrum of translation mismatches which this paper will bring to the fore.