Bringing ideology into the legal translation classroom: A step towards training translators for counterhegemonic legal translation?

Abstract

Pedagogical approaches should allow translation trainees to recognize the factors that impact on their decision-making. Nonetheless, the role of ideology has received scant attention when exploring translators’ decision-making in translator training. In this paper, framed within counterhegemonic legal translation (Favila-Alcalá, 2020), we advocate bringing ideology into the legal translation classroom by outlining a case study method to be used in the classroom. This method aims to assist trainees in unravelling the underlying ideology of the source texts and the parallel texts involved in the translation process and in evaluating the implications for their subsequent translation. It foregrounds that, if the texts involved in the translation process are not critically and systematically scrutinized in training contexts, trainees’ decision-making may be unconsciously influenced by the underlying ideology behind these texts.