THE TRANSLATION STRATEGIES ADOPTED BY UNDERGRADUATE AND POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS

Abstract

Legal translation requires students to transfer linguistic meaning while also recognizing the legal function of specialized terms, archaic connectors, foreign expressions, and system-bound concepts. This study examines how undergraduate and postgraduate students at Universitas Brawijaya handled these problems by answering three research questions: whether their overall legal translation quality differed significantly, what translation techniques appeared in their renderings, and why they chose particular translation strategies. Using a mixed-methods comparative design, 34 undergraduate students and six postgraduate students completed a 26-sentence English-Indonesian legal translation task drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and structured around Haigh’s legal-text peculiarities. The final statistical comparison included 33 undergraduate and six postgraduate participants. Translation quality was assessed by two evaluators using an adapted rubric based on Nababan et al. (2015), translation techniques were classified using Molina and Hurtado Albir’s (2002) taxonomy, and six participants were interviewed to examine reported decision-making. The postgraduate group achieved a higher overall mean score (M = 224.750, SD = 12.7701) than the undergraduate group (M = 209.788, SD = 16.8741), and the Mann-Whitney U test showed a significant difference between the groups (p = 0.009 < 0.05). Six techniques were identified: literal translation, amplification, borrowing, modulation, established equivalent, and adaptation, with literal translation occurring most frequently. Interview data showed that students’ choices were shaped by familiarity with legal terminology, contextual checking, and limited exposure to authentic legal translation practice. The study’s distinctive contribution lies in linking statistical quality differences, micro-level technique selection, and students’ reported reasoning within the same legal translation task. This combined perspective shows that literal translation is not inherently weak or strong; it is appropriate when it preserves legal meaning, but insufficient when legal expressions require contextual or legal adjustment.