Keywords
legal translation, integrative literature review, BERTopic, translation competence, legal interpreting.
Abstract
This integrative literature review synthesizes existing research on legal translation to identify major thematic domains and generate new frameworks for understanding this critical field. Through systematic analysis of 139 publications from the Web of Science Core Collection (1900-2025) using BERTopic computational modeling combined with expert interpretation, six major research domains were identified: theoretical foundations and methodological approaches, competence development and training, technology integration and machine translation, legal interpreting in court and police settings, translation of culturally-embedded legal concepts, and legal translation in institutional and multilingual settings. The temporal analysis reveals exponential growth in scholarly output, particularly from 2017 onwards, with 70% of publications concentrated in the 2017-2025 period, indicating the field’s rapid maturation. Research areas demonstrate strong interdisciplinary engagement, with linguistics-based approaches (75%) complemented by communication studies, humanities, and social sciences perspectives. Key findings reveal a methodological shift toward corpus-based empirical research, growing emphasis on translator competence models incorporating comparative legal knowledge, significant challenges in technology integration despite advances in machine translation, and complex dynamics in multilingual institutional contexts. The review identifies persistent gaps in assessment frameworks, technology-enhanced pedagogy, and cross-cultural conceptual translation, while highlighting the field’s evolution from peripheral concern to central area of translation studies scholarship with profound implications for justice delivery and international legal cooperation.
