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ILETA Winter School Speaker: Patrizia Giampieri

On 15 January 2026 by

Patrizia Giampieri

University of Perugia

Title of Presentation

Comparing students’ with chatbot-driven legal translations

Abstract

The increased reliance on GenAI and chatbots has led several scholars to investigate their potentials and usefulness in translator training (Briva-Iglesias et al., 2024; Moneus and Sahari 2024; Alwazna et al. 2025). Nonetheless, few studies have focused on the legal field.

This paper is aimed at exploring and assessing the employability of GenAI in legal translator training. More precisely, it examines whether and how chatbot-powered legal translations can be harnessed to help students in Translation Studies develop critical thinking and analytical skills.

For this purpose, 38 Master’s students were involved in a translation project. They firstly translated an extract of a contract clause from English (their L1) into Italian (their L2). To perform the task, they could consult any language resource except for AI/chatbots.

They were then exposed to several chatbot-based translations of the source text, thereby comparing their outputs with the ones produced by intelligent machines. The chatbots employed for this investigation were both field-related (such as Aptus AI and ChatLaw) and general (i.e., ChatGPT and Copilot).

The findings indicate that the students’ language resources were often untargeted, thereby giving rise to a few translation infelicities and shortcomings. This was probably due to the students’ scarce familiarity with legal language and/or with legal translation. On the other hand, GenAI-driven translations appeared as quite satisfactory and were successfully mainstreamed in translator training. Namely, automated target texts helped reflect on possible or alternative translation options, thus providing language solutions that had not been considered. Other times, conversely, erroneous or inaccurate target words or phrases allowed students to notice differences, ask for explanations, and possibly retain adequate legal language conventions and patterns. In this respect, the pivotal role of the lecturer was essential to guarantee the correct interpretation and adjustments of chatbot-powered outputs.

Biography

Patrizia Giampieri, MSc, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English at University of Perugia(Italy). She is a member of the Executive Board of EST (European Society for Translation Studies), and of the Scientific Committee of ILETA (International Legal English Teacher’s Academy). She is a court interpreter and translator. She has authored books and academic papers on English as a second language, legal English and legal translation, corpus-based translation, machine translation, AI-driven translation. Her last scientific monographs are titled “Legal Formulae: Exploring legal multi-words in English, Italian and French” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025).

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