Errors in Spanish-German legal translation: The contract of purchase and sale of real property as a case study

Research into translation errors may actually be considered one of the most important aims of translation didactics because its main purpose consists in comprehending the mental processes subjacent in the students' so-called "black box", in establishing a methodology which facilitates the comprehension of these processes and in optimally evaluating the students' translation strategies in the classroom. In the first place, the present dissertation describes different methodological suggestions of some of the most important translation theorists and pedagogues regarding a classification of language and translation errors. There contributions show that in error assessment a prescriptive attitude will prove insufficient and it will be necessary to include other factors such as pragmatic, communicative and cognitive ones. Apart from the importance of analysing the original text and the exhaustive recourse to parallel texts which proved to be very useful in target text production, the mental processes at compile time will be noted. We take the translation of a legal text from Spanish into German as an example and, for our case study, we apply the method of "thinking-aloud-protocols" in order to detect the origins of the errors committed by the student groups during the translation of a contract of purchase and sale of real property. We base our results on the summaries of the transcripted errors and we develop a new functional-cognitive error taxonomy for legal translation.