Legal translator training: Partnership between teachers of English for legal purposes and legal specialists

Training legal English specialists is one area in which cooperation between discipline and language specialists is particularly valuable. Seven short excerpts from a short training course run jointly by teachers of English for legal purposes and legal specialists are presented and analysed to illustrate the contribution an ESP oriented approach, involving a high degree of subject specialist and ELP teacher cooperation can make to a very specific training need. These episodes provide illustrations of the interaction between legal translators and law lecturers centred on solving specific legal terminology questions. They are contextualized within an ethnographic account of courses designed and run for legislative translation teams from Central and Eastern European countries involved in European integration related translation activities. The data point to features of legal seminar discourse which would merit further investigation with possible applications for English for Academic Legal Purposes.