Sharing knowledge without borders: Collaboration between U.S. business and law students and Spanish translation students

Abstract

Collaboration between technical and professional (TP) writers in English as a second language is important for successful communication. This is evident in legal documents in both English and Spanish, where accuracy and clarity are paramount. However, achieving this is challenging because law students often lack effective writing tools, and translation students may lack the required encyclopedic knowledge. The present paper describes a co-designed exchange project between U.S. students in business and law and students of legal translation at a university in Spain. This paper aims to determine potential improvements in students’ encyclopedic and conceptual knowledge of this specialized language and their translation performance after the collaboration intervention. To evaluate these aspects, three textual items were targeted: terminological, nominal and, what we call, substitutional density. Our results indicate that peer collaboration helped Spanish students acquire encyclopedic knowledge in the field and avoid repetitive terms in their translations, leading to greater textual cohesion through the use of general language, synonyms and hypernyms. Other aspects of this peer collaboration as well as follow-up approaches to consolidate the observed effects are needed.