Legal Translation Problems: The Trials of Specialised Translation Competence

This paper presents the results of an empirical study aimed at investigating the translation problems faced by a cohort of graduates in translation with no specialisation in legal translation on the one hand, and a cohort of linguistically-skilled law graduates with no translation background on the other, who translated the same criminal law document from English into Italian. The acceptability of the translations produced by the sample has been assessed by using PACTE's (2009) methodology to contrast the overall performance of each group. These qualitative findings have then been triangulated with process-related data collected through keystroke logging, screen and video recording to assess the significance of subjectfield knowledge on the participants' translation performance in specialised translation (cf. Hjort-Pedersen and Faber 2005; Cao 2007).