Legal Translation Teaching Methods in Russian-English Language Pair

The paper presents a comparative research of various legal translation teaching methods within the framework of TBLT approach to TESOL. It aims to suggest the combination of relatively effective teaching methods, which may facilitate the learning of direct and reverse legal translation skill in Legal English ESP courses. The author of the study periodically assessed the translation skills of learners at the Russian State University of Justice in Moscow until they completed one semester of a Legal English ESP course. The research data shows the progress of students' translating competence formation, exposes the structure of various translation subskills and evaluates the students' readiness for professional cross-cultural communication at the end of the first semester of training. It is suggested that the optimal combination of methods is the balanced use of grammar-translation method, communicative method and case method, as well as tasks on the overcoming of 15 difficulties of legal translation in Russian-English language pair. Legal translation is defined as a language mediation (Garzone, Viezzi 2002) that creates an equivalent and adequate replacement of the source legal document in the target language. The difficulty of translation in Legal English is a situation of potential communicative failure that arises in the process of interpreting the meaning of a legal text in the source language (S.L.) and creating an adequate and equivalent text in the target language (T.L.).