Terminology as a source of difficulty in translating international legal discourses: an empirical cross-genre study

Despite the persistent focus on terminology in legal translation studies, to date, no large-scale research has empirically explored the difficulty of terminology in translating legal genres. Approaches to translation difficulty in translation studies more broadly remain limited in scope. To fill this gap, a study was conducted to measure the difficulty associated with the translation of legal terminology and phraseology, as well as with terminology of other domains, in the LETRINT 1+ corpus, including nine representative genres of three institutional settings (the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization). For comparative purposes, four levels of translation difficulty were assigned to multiple terminological features by a group of specialized translators through a consensus-building process of annotation based on the cognitive effort estimated for translation decision-making. The difficulty scores obtained confirm the correlation between legal singularity and higher translation difficulty, as well as the connection of more commonly used legal terms and phrasemes, and core economic terms, with lower difficulty levels. The findings also provide evidence of the prominence of non-legal specialized terminology in institutional legal discourses, and the aggregate terminological difficulty levels of each genre examined, which can be particularly useful for informing translation quality assurance, project management and translator training.

It's About Bloody Time and Space

Time frames relationships of power, especially in the context of law. One of the clearest ways in which time is implicated in both law and society is via discourses about women’s biological functions. This Article is an introduction to a larger project that analyzes legal discourses regarding a crucial aspect of women’s calendrically-associated biological functions: women’s menstrual periods. Over the course of the project, I explore legal discourses about menstruation through the notion of what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls “chronotopes”—a connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. Temporality, Bakhtin argues, is closely associated with certain paradigmatic spaces, and the combination of shapes, ideologies, and identities. Legal discussions of women’s menstrual bleeding are key sites for the discursive creation and maintenance of certain ideologies of womanhood. These discussions appear in a wide variety of contexts and in ways that either explicitly reference or implicitly index ideologies of female identity. All are characterized by efforts to mark them as narratives linked to other temporally prior or future moments, and are often indices of chronologically or spatially related stigmas and taboos. While legal discourses of menstruation do not give a complete account of the category “woman,” they provide cogent examples of how womanhood ideologies are constructed in legal contexts.

Legal Traditions

Legal anthropology has to understand and deal with complex and often plural constellations of normative bodies, legal discourses, institutions, and practices. They shape the legal regimes people live in. These legal regimes as well as the ways in which societies operate with legal diversity have developed over time. History has done more than shape the vocabulary and the grammar of each community’s law. The narratives we produce about the past are also used to construct and express individual and social identities. Thus, history and its (re)construction by later generations can impose constraints and limit available options, but also open spaces of negotiation and provide for innovation. Legal regimes of the past are often called ‘legal traditions’. In the last decades, the idea of ‘legal traditions’ has gained considerable practical importance. Especially in former colonial countries, and due to the increasing recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in international and national law, many actors are drawing on history to claim rights and obligations for the present and the future. In a similar manner, some historical legal regimes seem to embody injustice, leading to pleas for the recognition of their unjust character or even for material compensation. The aim of this chapter is to offer some reflections on the concept of ‘legal traditions’ and its role in constructing our identities and shaping our present legal regimes.

Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics

This essay is a survey of methods applied and topics scrutinized in legal-linguistic studies. It starts with the elucidation of the epistemic interest that led to the emergence and to the subsequent expansion of the mainstream legal-linguistic knowledge that we dispose of today. Thus, the essay focuses upon the development of problem awareness in the emerging legal-linguistic studies as well as upon the results of research that might be perceived as the state of the art in the mainstream legal linguistics. Meanwhile, some methodologically innovative tilts and twists that enrich and inspire contemporary legal linguistics are considered as well. Essentially, this essay traces the conceptual landscape in which the paradigms of legal-linguistic studies came about. This conceptual landscape extends from the research into the isolated words of law and the style used by jurists to the scrutiny of legal texts and legal discourses in all their socio-linguistic complexity. Within this broad frame of reference, many achievements in legal-linguistic studies are mentioned in order to sketch the consequences of processes in which legal-linguistic paradigms take shape. The author concludes upon a vision of legal linguistics called pragmatic legal linguistics as the newest stage in the intellectual enterprise that aims to pierce the language of the law and by so doing to understand law better.

Bilingual Heaven: Was There a Distinct Persianate Islam in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire?

What is the language of heaven? Is Arabic the only language allowed in the eternal world of the virtuous, or will Muslims continue to speak their native languages in the other world? While learned scholars debated the language of heaven since the early days of Islam, the question gained renewed vigor in seventeenth century Istanbul against the background of a puritan reform movement which criticized the usage of Persian and the Persianate canon as sacred text. In response, Mevlevī authors argued for the discursive authority of the Persianate mystical canon in Islamic tradition (sunna). Focusing on this debate, this article argues that early modern Ottoman authors recognized non-legal discourses as integral and constitutive parts of the Islamic tradition. By adopting the imagery of bilingual heaven, they conceptualized Islamic tradition as a diverse discursive tradition. Alongside diversity, another important feature of Persianate Islam was a positive propensity towards innovations.

The Enigma of a Taiping Fugitive: The Illusion of Justice and the “Political Offence Exception” in Extradition from Hong Kong

In 1865, the British Colony of Hong Kong extradited a Chinese shop-owner on a charge of piracy and incited a barrage of criticism when the offender was punished by the infamous “death by a thousand cuts” in Canton upon his rendition. Rumors surfaced identifying him as a rebel chief in the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). By excavating court records, diplomatic exchanges, and legal discourses surrounding this case, the article engages in a critical examination of extradition law and implementation in mid-19th century between Hong Kong and China. It examines how the case played into the politics of four administrative localities - Hong Kong, Canton, Beijing, and London - and uncovers the networks of agencies at play. It contributes to the history of extradition by contextualizing the “political offence exception” in international law and explains how this exception, ill-defined and vaguely conceived as it was, found its way into the implementation of Article 21 of the Treaty of Tianjin on the rendition of fugitives from Hong Kong to China, with a significant impact on the Qing's governance and jurisdiction of cross-border fugitives.

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

For many decades, scholars of gender and women's history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women's agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women's condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

For many decades, scholars of gender and women’s history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women’s agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women’s condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Operationalizing Peirce’s Syllabus in terms of icons and stereotypes

Peirce’s Syllabus is examined and used to interpret metaphoric iconic stereotypes applied to Indigenous people: “noble savage,” “bloodthirsty savage,” “domestic dependent nation,” “vanishing race,” “Indian tribe,” and “ecological Indian.” Efforts on the part of the Indigenous to replace the these stereotypes with different icons such as “Native American,” “First Nations,” and, most recently, “water protectors,” are also examined. The usefulness of representamen categories from Peirce’s Syllabus, “rhematic,” “Argument,” “dicent,” “indexical,” “qualisign,” “legisign,” and “sinsign,” is demonstrated. Greimas’ observations about the functions of modalities are brought in to explain how graphic images and portraiture, fictional and memoir narratives, legal discourses, and popular media representations implement various sections of the Syllabus. Putting Peirce’s Syllabus into action confirms its ability to perform dynamic, diachronic, and diagrammatic functions.