Pre-Editing Rules for Machine Translation in the Legal Field: A Review of the Governing Principles of the ISO 24495 Standards on Plain Language

Abstract

This chapter examines plain language and pre-editing for machine translation (MT) in the legal field. In particular, it assesses how useful the governing principles, guidelines and techniques included in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)’s 24495 plain language standards can be for pre-editing legal texts as part of MT workflows. Apart from providing an overview of relevant research on pre-editing in translation, this chapter examines this concept by focusing on two particular aspects. First, it studies pre-editing in the context of legal translation and the issues normally associated with it, namely a very high degree of specialization and an elaborate, often opaque language style. Second, it explores the ISO plain language standards as a source of rules to pre-edit legal texts to make them more “translatable” for MT procedures. These standards include Part 1 (ISO 24495-1:2023 Plain language—Part 1: Governing principles and guidelines) and, more relevantly, Part 2 (ISO 24495-2:2025 Plain language—Part 2: Legal communication), specific to the field of law. With the help of some examples in the Spanish-English combination, this contribution shows how the precepts contained in the standards could be of help in improving the quality of neural MT outputs.