Vocabulary exercises as complementary material for the French – Spanish legal translation

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on the interest to design and to use vocabulary exercises as complementary material for the teaching of legal translation. In this proposal exercises are classified in two main categories: according to the moment when they are suggested to the students, before or after translating the text, and according to the objectives, either to prepare the translation of the text or to review previous studied lexical/vocabulary units. Its usefulness is shown in a double sense: first of all, they contribute to enrich the lexical and cultural knowledge of the student in both languages, and secondly to develop cognitive abilities such as the deduction and the reformulation, both of them necessary to carry out not only a legal translation but any type of translation.