I. Legal Language and Prescriptive Legal Texts 23

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Legal Language ◽  
Legal Texts

scholarly journals A simplification of the Consumer Rights Act. Plain legal language and legal language

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 45-71
Author(s):  
Natalia Zych
Keyword(s):  
Effective Communication ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Consumer Rights ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Average Reader ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Cost

The article examines the idea of plain legal language as a standard in creating comprehensible and effective communication in legislative acts. It features plain legal language techniques and tools used to tackle the visual and linguistic layer of legal texts. Selected techniques were implemented to experimentally modify the Polish Consumer Rights Act of 30 May 2014. The document, transformed in the spirit of plain legal language, was then submitted for assessment to lawyers as well as individuals with no legal background. The article features the results of the experiment as well as conclusions which make it possible to say whether the “simplified” act is more comprehensible to an average reader, and to assess the cost of the changes introduced in the original provisions of the law.

Tendenzen zu einer geschlechtsneutralen Rechtssprache in Deutschland, Österreich und der Slowakei

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-173
Author(s):  
Alena Ďuricová
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Translation Practice ◽  
Legal Texts

TENDENCIES TOWARDS GENDER – THE EQUITABLE LEGAL LANGUAGE IN GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND SLOVAKIA The article focuses on a special feature of legal language – its prevailing “masculine“ character. An initial theoretical outline of this peculiarity is followed by a comparative linguistic analysis of using masculine and feminine forms in German and Slovak legal terms. Our linguistic analysis is based on the comparison of legal texts collected from the author´s translation practice. The research has been conducted from the perspective of translatology and it presents examples documenting translation solutions with regard to issues of the gender equality in legal language.

scholarly journals Grupa nominalna w ustawach . System wewnątrztekstowych-odniesień

2016 ◽  
pp. 95-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romana Łapa
Keyword(s):  
Legal Language ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Initial Location ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Two Component ◽  
Event Driven ◽  
Nominal Groups ◽  
Polish Language

This paper deals with a group of contemporary legal texts which have the form of statutes. The author describes the anaphoric relation between nominal groups (NG) constituted by an event-driven element and sentences which are linearly prior to these groups, the so-called antecedents. The analysis, founded on principles of syntax with a semantic basis, provides observations about restrictions in the formalisation of elements of the semantic base whose elements can be connected with the use of NG. The disclosure of elements of the content plan, excluding exceptions, entails a condensation which causes that categorical meanings that are the most intensely governed and communicatively relevant are fulfilled on the surface. The inability to reproduce the meaning of the “grammatical agent” causes that NG with a constitutive event-driven element are an indication of the depersonalisation attributed to legal texts. The repeatability of NG, mainly one- and two-component phrases, as well as their initial location in an utterance are factors depicting another feature of statutes: syntactic schematism. The author also demonstrates that the system of intratextual references is not the same in various variants of the Polish language. In the statute, as a genre of the legal language, its specific nature is already noticeable within one of the systematising units of the legal text, i.e. the article. The specific nature of the examined relation is conditioned by (1) the proper arrangement of structures connected with a network of references, and (2) the manner of their denotation. These features are the results of adherence to the editorial principles of legal texts.

scholarly journals Law for Elites

2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Terezie Smejkalová ◽  
Markéta Štěpáníková
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Legal Regulations ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Special Group ◽  
Competent Speaker ◽  
Legal Power ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Advantageous Position

Abstract It has been claimed that to fully understand the law, one must know the language of normative texts and the relevant rules governing its use. It usually means that normative texts do not seem to be comprehensible enough to persons without formal legal training. In an on-going research project, we are focusing on the process of writing texts of legal regulations, conducting semi-structured interviews with those involved in drafting normative texts. In this paper, we focus on lawyers as a speech community of legal language speakers and we discuss why and to what extent this speech community may be considered an elite in a society. We show that competent usage of special – legal – language in regulating the whole society may help create a special group of persons wielding an important segment of cultural capital: the knowledge of legal language, and, in consequence, competent knowledge of law. Given the fact that this language is used to exercise (legal) power in a society, lawyers appear to be in the advantageous position of an elite. We argue that those who draft new legal texts reproduce writing rules and customs, constantly re-creating legal language as a language mostly incomprehensible to a non-competent speaker, and, in consequence, creating lawyers as an elite speech community.

scholarly journals A Contrastive Study of Four English Versions of Labor Contract Law of the People's Republic of China

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 1401-1408
Author(s):  
Mao Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Contract Law ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Labor Contract ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
The World ◽  
Labor Contract Law

Law is a system of rules of conduct that are created by the national legislature in accordance with the legislative procedures and are enforced by the state power. Legal language, as the manifestation of law and the carrier of the legal information, must be accurate and formal. On the ground of the special function of law, words are dedicatedly selected and used within the given field in legal texts. Some unique lexical features of legal language can be found easily to ensure the accuracy and formalness of legal texts, such as the employment of archaic words, the use of loan words and the application of formal words. The contrastive study is conducted from the lexical aspect of the four English versions of Labor Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China, with an attempt to find out the differences in formalness of the law caused by different uses of words in four versions and wish legal translators pay more attention to formality and accuracy of legal words. As for the four versions, one is taken from PKU’s legal academic sector, marked as V1 in the following comparative study. One is translated by Backer & Mckenzie(V2), one of the biggest legal agents in the world, which functions as an introduction of Chinese government’s policies concerning labor contracts to the world. One is taken from the official website the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China (NPC), marked as V3. And the other is taken from Shuangcheng Attorneys at Law in association with China Axis Limited, marked as V4 in the following contrastive study.

The limits of plain legal language: understanding the comprehensible style in law

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 246-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsolt Ződi
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Language Understanding ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Linguistic Problem ◽  
Technical Rules

AbstractThe comprehensible style of legal texts seems to be a predominantly linguistic problem. This is how the plain-legal-language movements present it. But, while plain-language statutes have been on the agenda for decades in every civilised country, laws still become more and more complicated. The paper attempts to explain this controversy. First, it argues that comprehensibility has more aspects beyond the linguistic or stylistic one. Sometimes it is the linguistically simplest texts that raise the most serious comprehensibility problems. The paper refers to two pieces of corpus linguistic research that provide evidence that vocabulary and grammar in themselves do not explain the incomprehensibility of the legal texts. Second, for a more subtle handling of the comprehensibility problem, the paper offers a framework of three typical pragmatic situations – the processual, the problem-solving and the compliance settings – where comprehensibility problems arise in different ways. The conclusion of the paper is that, contrary to the usual explanation that the main reason for incomprehensibility is that, in law, clarity and accuracy can be only employed at each other's expense, it is rather the systemic and interpretive character of law and the growing importance of technical rules that hinder the understanding of legal texts.

Legal metaphors in translation

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Vegara Fabregat
Keyword(s):  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
Interesting Aspect ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
Legal Texts

There is wide literature on metaphor and legal language (e.g., Henly 1987; Twardzisz 2008, amongst many others). Certainly, metaphor is a part of legal language (Alcaraz and Hughes 2002: 43), but not just an ornamental part. Metaphors may play a very important role in legal texts, a cognitive role. They can convey intricate legal notions and may also communicate certain opinions and perspectives (Dickerson 1996: 374; Joo 2002: 23). Another interesting aspect connected with metaphors in the language of law is translation. We must bear in mind that legal translation has its own special difficulties, such as complex terminology and usually two very dissimilar legal systems as background (Soriano 2002: 53; Gémar 2002: 167). Metaphorical expressions constitute an additional hindrance for legal translators since they transfer a metaphorical image together with a legal concept. In the present study we aim at analysing some metaphorical expressions found in the United States Supreme Court opinions and their translation. We will focus on the scrutiny of some English–Spanish translation strategies in order to comment on the solutions adopted. Our hope is to shed some light on the field of legal translation regarding metaphors.

scholarly journals Frame Semantics and legal corpora annotation

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anderson Bertoldi ◽  
Rove Chishman
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Annotation ◽  
Initial Step ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Frame Semantics ◽  
Legal Texts

This paper presents a theoretical discussion about the use of Frame Semantics as corpora annotation paradigm. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the applicability of Frame Semantics theory and FrameNet paradigm for the semantic annotation of legal texts. The work presented in this paper is an initial step in the construction of a treebank for the Brazilian legal language.

scholarly journals Narrativity of Legal Language in Law-Making Processes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Skuczyński
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Narrative Text ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Professional Self ◽  
Argumentative Structure ◽  
Law Making

The paper concerns the relation between argumentative and narrative features of legal texts and the question whether legal texts can be perceived as narrative texts. A narrative text is understood as transferring a story to the recipient through a given medium. The story, being the content of a narrative text, constitutes a specific way of manifesting the plot. The latter is a sort of internal logic of the story. The very same plot might be told in many different ways. Hence, the narrative text does not depict events directly, but through a story that requires a storytelling agent – the narrator. Certainly, there are different kinds of narrators, who can be more or less exposed within the text. In consequence, there are at least five positions concerning the relation between argumentation and narration in law: 1) sceptic – narration is a negation of the reasonableness of law; 2) narration is a structure of presentation of facts; 3) narration is a means of rhetoric persuasion; 4) narration is a meta-argumentative structure; 5) narration is a subject of critical analysis as it reveals the identity of an author. The theory of narration is applied to a particular problem of participation of professional self-governments in law-making.

scholarly journals Translation Strategies in Legal Texts: Selected Articles of the Translation of the US-Iraqi Security Agreement

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Ahmed Ibrahim Abed ◽  
Omar A. Shihab ◽  
Mushtaq A. Jameel
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Text Segment ◽  
Legal Translation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Legal Texts

Legal language is characterized as the professional use of words. Thus, it can be said that the international law (as a result of translation and interpretation as well) has become more crucial. Therefore, legal translation has become important among the other domains of translation. This study aims at investigating the translation strategies adopted in translating the US- Iraqi security agreement from English into Arabic. So, there is a set of translation strategies that help translating the two texts properly and accurately. The translation strategies followed in translating the US- Iraqi security agreement will be investigated in the two of the two English and Arabic texts as there are many strategies in the linguistic theory of translation. Dr. As. Safi in his model covers both the local strategies which belonging to text segment and global ones that have to do with the whole text. Translation strategies are divided into general ones which deal with all types texts and specific strategies that deal with specific kinds of texts; specific ones are divided into domestication, compensation, (in kind, in place, by merging, or splitting and compensation by addition) , addition, elaboration and explication, and approximation and compromise. Thus, the text under study is a legal one and, of course, has a specific type of text; only specific strategies are applied in this study.

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