The challenge of legal language terminological collocations in translation: The case of machine translation from Russian into Spanish

Abstract

Today, rapidly advancing technology and artificial intelligence are transforming our lives in all areas, including translation. Machine translation, for its part, has significantly improved the quality of translation and in some areas has reached or surpassed human translation (MT). However, legal translation is inherently complex due to the use of fixed collocations or expressions and the unchangeable structure of legal language, which undoubtedly makes the task of translation difficult for machines. Therefore, the aim of this work is to respond to the urgent need to analyse the usefulness of MT as a digital teaching resource in the teaching of legal translation in phraseology. Thus, this article examines the challenge of machine translation of terminological collocations in the legal language of criminal law in the Russian-Spanish translation classroom through a test-type exercise with master’s students. The results obtained show that although machine translation tools can be useful in some cases, their effectiveness in phraseological translation is limited and they can lead to significant translation errors, which is why a measured and critical use under human supervision is recommended.