Issues of ESP in Kosova and the Challenges in the Teaching and Translation of the Criminal Law to University Students

This Presentation makes an analysis of the translation of the criminal laws for teaching purposes, i.e. Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes of Kosovo, which constitute the most important pieces of legislation until now. The ultimate objective of the Presentation is to propose a set of principles designed to facilitate English Albanian legal translation which will enable future ESP teachers to understand and apply it in an educational context. The research for this Presentation involved, mainly, desk research on (a) the criminal codes of Kosovo, both their English and Albanian-translated versions, and (b) general literature and web resources on legal systems, linguistic issues and approaches to legal translation world-wide with the purpose to fill the research gap regarding the ESP teaching. The Presentation adopts a qualitative corpus approach. The English version of the codes serves as the corpus of the original text, and the other corpus is comprised of their Albanian- translated versions for a comparison and contrast of English and Albanian semantic and grammatical relations employed in the translation of these legal texts. The Presentation provides a set of findings, and draws conclusions in the final section in regard to the teaching aspects and teaching methodology. The conclusions are based on an in-depth analysis of the translation of the criminal codes, and an assessment of the available options and suggestions intended to serve as useful reference for legal translators and ESP instructors.