1 Introduction

Specialized English is closely related to specific disciplines, professions, or fields of activity, and its teaching methods focus on the language characteristics, discourse practices, and communication skills of the target group, meeting the needs of professional knowledge. Translation practice, as an important component of specialized English learning, has the characteristics of strong pertinence and high degree of specialization. Researchers emphasize the importance of offering translation courses based on learners' specific purposes and needs, and have achieved certain research results. This article will explore how to design practical teaching of legal text translation in specialized English classrooms to improve teaching quality.

2 Theoretical Foundations

This paper explores the theoretical basis of translation practice in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms, emphasizing that translation practice is an important tool in ESP teaching, which can enhance learners' language skills and communication comprehension abilities in specific fields. The role of translation practice in ESP teaching is mainly reflected in improving reading comprehension ability, vocabulary and terminology ability, and social language ability. Translation helps learners deepen their understanding of professional texts, expand their vocabulary, improve language expression accuracy, and promote social communication and understanding. In addition, translation practice can enhance learners' analytical abilities, promote learning outcomes, and cultivate critical thinking and cross-cultural communication skills. Compared with general English, translation practice in ESP classrooms has the characteristics of knowledge reserve, content and style, and precision requirements, emphasizing more on the mastery of specific domain knowledge and the combination of professional background. The course design of translation practice needs to consider the language characteristics of professional courses and the learning status of learners, in order to improve their ability to use language in the professional field.

3 Course Design

This chapter explores the design of a practical course on legal text translation, aimed at providing professional translation skills training for undergraduate senior students or first-year graduate students, as well as working professionals. The course adopts a "structured dynamic teaching" mode, which is divided into sixteen weeks. The first two weeks are primary comprehensive teaching, introducing the general theory of translation and the characteristics of legal language; The third to seventh weeks are the first round of English to Chinese translation practice; Stage reflection in the eighth week; The ninth to fourteenth weeks are the second round of Chinese English translation practice; The fifteenth week is advanced comprehensive teaching, exploring legal translation strategies and principles; The sixteenth week is the course summary. The selection of teaching resources emphasizes meeting the needs of learners, highlighting key points, and adopting diverse forms to enhance metacognitive abilities, including legal translation of academic works, translations, typical examples, and electronic resources. Teachers need to predict the connection between resources, materials, and methods, and plan course resources reasonably. The accuracy of legal language is highly required, and teachers need to invest more effort in vocabulary and syntax. In terms of measuring the difficulty of translation practice, foreign scholars focus on principles, while domestic scholars focus on methods, emphasizing the consideration of learners' foreign language proficiency, training objectives, and hierarchical design. Teachers can refer to the Reading Difficulty Scale to assess language difficulty, such as syntactic complexity. Translation practice focuses on different genres of legal texts, such as legislative texts, contract texts, and judicial texts, interpreting discourse structure and discourse style to help learners familiarize themselves with the requirements of discourse genres. Legislative texts require translators to accurately convey legal elements, contract texts must follow the principles of accuracy, refinement, consistency, and standardization, and judicial texts require the preservation of the original genre, style, and structure, following the principles of consistency and accuracy. The course design can also appropriately supplement other genres of legal texts, such as legal monographs, commentary articles, and courtroom interpretation texts, to help learners comprehensively master legal translation skills.

4 Conclusion

Explored the theoretical basis and curriculum design of legal text translation practice in specialized English classrooms. The importance of teaching resources was emphasized, and the impact of difficulty design on the level of translation practice teaching was analyzed. Point out the necessity of interpreting the genre characteristics of legal texts, and suggest that the translation tasks of different types of legal texts should be the focus of teaching design. At the same time, it is proposed that future curriculum design should pay attention to more factors such as the interaction between reading and translation, imitation conditions, limitations of translation examples, timeliness of translation resources, and generative artificial intelligence translation environment.