Technology and e-resources for legal translators : the LAW10n project

End User License Agreements are "those agreements as a result of which the licensee, purchaser of the license or user, receives from the licensor the right to use the programs under the terms agreed2"(Aparicio 2004:71). Software licenses first appeared in the United States of America. Translated into Spanish by the Licensor, and made available directly to users of the licensed software, these licensing agreements have now been incorporated into Spanish law. In legal translation ―in particular when translating End User License Agreements where the specificity of the cultural elements involved can lead to recurrent breakdowns in communication― an interpretative-communicative approach must be used, one in which the translator takes into consideration all the elements that directly impinge upon the decision-making process in translation, i.e., the client; target audience; legal or cultural context; legal requirements enforceable by law, etc. In practice, licensing agreements are translated as part of the process of localisation itself, i.e. semi-automatically. As a result, licensing agreements translated into Spanish do not reflect the spirit of the law underlying the source text; neither do they comply with the specific requirements of Spanish law. Although there is a gender of license agreements in Spanish -i.e. in patent law and other copyright law fields- this gender cannot be automatically applied to the case of software licenses because these licenses have special features. In this article we present the reason why the translation of software licence agreements deserves such a deep analysis and how existing legal e-resources are not enough to solve the translation challenges that this genre presents to translators. An English-Spanish bilingual corpus of translations has been created and analysed to evidence the legal implications of current translations and demonstrate the need to take into account not only the legal system of the target text but also translation proposals included in licences where the applicable law is that of the target culture. This article is addressed to translation lecturers and researchers interested in legal e-resources and instrumental translations