The legal translator as a digital humanist: On the use of digital corpora in professional legal translation

Thanks to digital technologies, the ways in which we can understand, access and query texts varies profoundly, generating new questions, issues and challenges. This clearly holds true for the application of digital tools to legal translation and, more specifically, for the use of legal corpora. Hereof, some of the salient questions to be posed include: How do we detect hermeneutically valuable translation patterns throughout the data offered by corpora? How do we navigate the deluge of metadata available? How do we account for the specificities of local legal systems that go beyond the macro scale? As its founding postulation this chapter takes the view that the translation of legal texts through the assistance of sophisticated computational tools is not in contrast to the traditional hermeneutic and operational goals of professionals and researchers operating in the field, but can actually serve the very same purposes.