ILETA is delighted to announce the inaugural ILETA Prize for Research in Comparative Legal Linguistics (2026), is awarded to Prof. Patrizia Giampieri for her outstanding contribution to the field of MT research.

Her book, Legal Machine Translation Explained: MT in Legal Contexts, has set a new benchmark in exploring the intersection between language, law, and technology. With clarity and depth, Patrizia offers invaluable insights into the challenges and opportunities of machine translation within legal frameworks—which is of growing importance for practitioners, scholars, and educators alike.

Patrizia explains what prompted her research: ‘I understood that automated translation in the legal field is very common and used, especially amongst lawyers. In this book, I show how it is possible to safely and accurately post-edit machine translated legal texts. To this aim, I analyse a range of different legal genres: contracts, letters issued by lawyers, pleadings etc. I also carry out a survey among professional translators and legal firms and enquire about their usages of automatic translation in the legal field.’

As Sofia Parastatidou, President of ILETA notes: “ILETA wishes to recognise leading scholars in the field of legal translation research. Patrizia’s work exemplifies the kind of rigorous, forward-looking research that advances both legal linguistics and legal education in a rapidly evolving, multilingual world.

I am proud to present this award to Prof. Patrizia Giampieri. Her work in this field is trail-blazing. At ILETA we celebrate not only the academic excellence of Patrizia’s work, but also innovation in advancing our understanding of how legal meaning is shaped, transferred, and interpreted across languages and systems.

Congratulations to Prof. Patrizia Giampieri on this well-deserved recognition!