Transius Conference 2015

On 24-26 June 2015, Transius held its first international conference, which combined two complementary events: a conference on Law, Translation and Culture (LTC5) organised in collaboration with the Multicultural Association of Law and Language (MALL), and a legal and institutional translation seminar organised in collaboration with IAMLADP’s Universities Contact Group (UCG).

During three days, over 250 participants, including practitioners, researchers and students, from 34 countries from all continents gathered in Geneva. The conference served as a forum for dialogue between legal translation academics and institutional experts with a common interest in legal translation and, more broadly, in translation practices in different institutional contexts. It featured 62 paper presentations, three keynote lectures, a poster session and three thematic roundtables with 16 representatives from international organisations. [More information about the conference]

"The focus of the conference was on legal translation and translation in institutional settings. It was an important international event, being the biggest legal translation conference since a similar event in the early 2000s, also in Geneva. [...] The conference gathered a nice mixture of researchers and practitioners (legal translators, interpreters and lawyer-linguists), and was an excellent networking opportunity.

To account for a mixed audience, the organisers ensured that the conference had a healthy balance of research and practice-oriented components. [...] The papers focused on methods of legal translation and translation of multilingual law, terminology and concept systems, legal translator training and certification, and quality assurance. They attested to the growing methodological rigour and a strong shift from prescriptive to descriptive and empirical, with research based on varied methodologies, such as corpus-based translation studies, discourse analysis, CDA or sociological studies of the profession. In short, they provided a broad overview of ongoing research activities in the field and new initiatives. [...] I particularly liked the themed roundtables as it was an excellent chance to learn and contrast institutional practices of high-level international organisations, including the optimisation of translation workflows, terminology management, quality assurance and innovations brought to improve processes or make them more cost-effective.

Overall, the high turnout at the conference and the number of papers/proposals are proof that, after a seeming period of stagnation in the last decade, Legal Translation Studies is thriving [...]."

Łucja Biel. Conference report: TRANSIUS Conference on Legal Translation. EST Newsletter. 47 : 25-26.