• Christian Collerg & Stephen Kobourov (2005). ‘Self plagiarism in Computer Science’, Communications of the American Computer Machinery (ACM Society). Vol 48 (No.4), pp 88-95.

Malcolm COULTHARD
School of Languages and Social Sciences
Aston University
UK

In My Opinion

At the time of writing, in later July, an internationally renowned British pediatrician has just been severely censured by his professional body and then struck off the medical register as a consequence of damning criticism of expert evidence he gave in cases of sudden infant death syndrome. To the end he asserted the correctness of his opinion, but did concede that he may have been wrong to express the opinion in terms of exaggerated and over-persuasive probabilities.

In this talk I will use examples from real cases to illustrate the problems facing the forensic linguist when s/he is asked to rate the strength of the evidence s/he is giving. I will relate this to the two levels of proof in British Courts - 'on the balance of probabilities 'and 'beyond reasonable doubt'.

Maurizio GOTTI
Universita di Bergamo
Italy

Legal Discourse across Communities and Cultures

In recent years, the dismantling of cultural, disciplinary and national barriers, especially in the context of co-operation and collaboration in international trade, has accelerated moves towards the globalisation of socio-cultural, business and communication issues. This globalising trend has also affected the legal field, where an international perspective is becoming more and more widespread. However, in spite of the growing efforts of the international community to guarantee greater and greater harmonisation in legislation and procedures, local constraints and specific cultural aspects still represent a relevant conditioning factor. This is clearly visible in the normative texts in use in the various contexts which show discrepancies deriving not only from differing legal and cultural systems, but also from the use of different linguistic codes. Indeed, nowadays many of the texts in use at a local level are the result of a process of translation or adaptation of more general documents formulated at an international level.

In this context, law is fast assuming an international perspective rather than remaining a purely domestic concern. A case in point is the process of building a common European legal framework, a task which is much more complex than the simple rendering of uniform normative documents in all the languages of the European Union, because this newly created framework is meant to be interpreted within the contexts of a diversity of individual legal systems and tongues. Indeed, in Europe the legal drafting issue has become extremely important with the elaboration of a multilingual legislation concerning the European Union.

It is the aim of this paper to investigate the means whereby normative discourse (statutes and regulations) is employed in different cultural, linguistic and legal environments, analysing in particular the linguistic and discoursal properties of a multilingual corpus of international arbitration laws drawn from a number of different countries, cultures, and socio-political backgrounds, written in different languages, and used within and across a variety of legal systems.

Peter SANDRINI
University of Innsbruck
Austria

Globalisation, Law and Translation

Globalisation has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in the modern world. In law we also can observe a tendency towards a tighter global embedding of national legislation. Since cooperation between national legal systems and all kinds of contacts between local legal settings are a key factor for the translation of legal texts, a few historical notes on the evolving of national legal systems will be given. This would be the basis for an identification of the parameters of international legal communication which lead over to the main theme of this presentation: the factors influencing legal translation. Much has been written about legal translation in the last 15-20 years with scholars coming from comparative law, civil law, linguistics, translation studies or semiotics seeing legal translation from very different angles. So, it should be interesting to try to bring together all possible factors governing legal translation into a comprehensive overview. While there are some parameters which influence the interpretation of a legal text, the eminent factor of legal translation is the purpose the translated text will have and the context of its use. A description of the key factors will, therefore, inevitably lead to a classification of translation functions. I will try to combine these into a comprehensive schema taking into account global and local legal content. This is based on some of my previous publications but also on a recent German book (Wiesmann 2004).

A few notes on the difference between legal translation and legal terminology should highlight the importance of eliminating some of the factors which are important for legal translation to achieve a good quality in compiling systematic legal terminology.

Susan ŠARCEVIC
Faculty of Law
University of Rijeka
Croatia

Legal Translation in the European Union

This paper deals with legal translation in the European Union since the historic enlargement of 1 May 2004. At each wave of enlargement the question has been raised whether the EC, later the EU could retain its founding principle of multilingualism. Again, the answer was a resounding “yes” although compromises have had to be made in practice, sometimes putting a strain on language equality. Today Community legislation is “drafted” and published in the 20 official languages of the Union, all texts being equally authentic at least in theory. After a brief introduction to the unique language policy of the European Union, the author analyzes the pros and cons of multilingual communication in the law, here European law. Whereas multilingual legislation is instrumental to democracy, it often leads to different results in practice, thus endangering the uniform interpretation and application of Community law, especially by the national courts of the Member States. Special emphasis is placed on language-related problems of translating EU legal texts, such as the role of “small” vs. “world” languages and the new concept of faithful translation.

Lawrence M. SOLAN
Brooklyn Law School
New York 11201
USA

USA Statutory Interpretation in the EU: In Praise of Babel

The European Union now has 25 members and 20 official languages. Directives enacted by the EU are promulgated in multiple languages, and each version is authoritative. This creates a seemingly unmanageable problem: When a dispute arises over a business transaction between say, Finland and Spain, which versions of the applicable law should “count” when the court has to make a decision?

The European Court of Justice has adopted a policy that permits any version of the statute to be used in argument in any dispute before it, whether or not any of the parties to the dispute speak that language. In this paper, I call this practice “the Augustinian approach” to statutory interpretation, and defend it as sensible.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine, an essentialist, advocated for examining all translations of the Bible to determine God’s actual message. By searching for differences among the translations, it became possible to infer just where human language has interceded. When that happened, triangulating among the various versions, and employing extra-textual strategies became appropriate.

Much the same strategy is used by the European Court of Justice and by other tribunals that interpret multilingual statutes. The success of this approach depends largely upon the extent to which word meaning is similar across languages and cultures. The paper looks at advances in linguistic lexical semantics and the psychology of concepts to argue that this Augustinian approach has a strong underlying basis in contemporary learning.

PAPERS

£ucja BIEL
Institute of English
University of Gdañsk
Poland

Statutory and Contractual Precision-Regulation of Semantic Field Boundaries in the Language of Contracts and Related Translation Problems

This paper sets out to discuss how boundaries of semantic fields are regulated in legislation and in contracts to make language more precise and definite and what problems may be faced by translators due to different internal and external boundaries of semantic fields in the SL and the TL.

Everyday language is full of concepts with fuzzy boundaries. Furthermore, according to Langacker, polysemy is a natural phenomenon for lexical units and a frequently-used expression usually creates a network of interrelated senses. In contrast, legal language aims at reducing subjectivity, vagueness and ambiguity of meaning to limit the possibility of various interpretations. It is achieved by pointing to one established sense of a lexical item and ruling out other established senses and by precise definition of external and internal boundaries of semantic fields. Boundaries of major terms are frequently defined at the statutory level in legislation (laws, regulations, codes). For this reason most agreements specify which legal framework governs their construal, via the “Applicable Law” clause. This clause may specifically include or exclude certain laws or regulations to further narrow the scope of interpretation. An important consequence for translators is that each country has its own legislation (in the case of the USA there is also state legislation); hence, may specify terminological boundaries in a different way at the statutory level. The paper will demonstrate different external and internal boundaries of corresponding legal terms in English and Polish and differences in the level of specificity with respect to equivalents (e.g. loan vs. kredyt and po¿yczka; insurance/assurance vs. ubezpieczenie; different classification of business entities in the English and Polish law: company and partnership vs. spó³ka, incompatible division of companies into private limited companies and public limited companies vs. spó³ka z ograniczon¹ odpowiedzialnoœci¹ and spó³ka akcyjna; one-tier and two-tier corporate governance model in the USA and in Europe, respectively and differences between the Board of Directors and Rada Nadzorcza and Zarz¹d). The author will also discuss cases when interpretation of a given term is strictly regulated in the SL legislation and not in the TL (e.g. forward looking statements).

The second level at which boundaries of semantic fields are made more precise is the contractual level. The language of contracts relies not only on statutorily-defined terms but also uses everyday words that have fuzzy boundaries. Contracts force a specific understanding of such words in the Definitions section, where rigid boundaries are defined, or in other clauses containing exclusions or limitations. In general, the language of English contracts is more precise than Polish and in particular US contracts are known to contain detailed explanations, qualifications and limitations in the language. One of typical features is a sequence of synonyms and redundancies (null and void, each and every, any and all, of any kind or nature, of any kind whatsoever, an agreement by and between), which causes a certain problem to Polish translators who want to maintain a similar degree of precision. Another device is related to the adversarial nature of legal English and aims at hedging against any loopholes and contingencies.

Sue BLACKWELL*, Jess SHAPERO* and Willem MEIJS**

*Department of English
University of Birmingham
UK
**Language Consultancy Desk
Birmingham
UK

Texts of Murder and Martyrdom

On 2nd November 2004, the Netherlands was shocked by the murder of the controversial journalist Theo van Gogh. He had been both shot and stabbed repeatedly, and a knife was left pinning a letter to his body: a lengthy diatribe addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch MP who had recently made a film with van Gogh about domestic violence against Muslim women. The letter informed Ali that she was next on the killer's hit-list. A further letter was found on the suspect, Mohammed Bouyeri. Like the first it was written in fluent Dutch, but this text was in verse and described the writer's expectations of martyrdom.

Of the 40% or so of suicides in Western Europe who leave notes, very few are also killers. The corollary of this is that very few murderers go onto kill themselves and leave suicide notes. Typically, suicide notes are fullof affection and, according to some research, have a positive outlook. This paper confronts a type of suicide which is different from that usuallyconsidered in academic research: the issue of "intent" is less applicable in thesecases and it seems, anecdotally at least, that most of these suicides do leave notes.Yet even in cases of suicide bombings in the Middle East where video testaments are common, texts left at the scene of the attack are unheard of.

The van Gogh texts probably constitute the first example of an attacker documenting in a European language their expectations of both killing and dying in an intended martyrdom operation. This paper will analyse the language of both the "murder note" and the "suicide note" in this case and will consider questions such as "How do murder-suicide notes differ from the typical suicide note?" and "should one expect the language of a suicide note to be typical of the writer's usual personal style?"

Victor J. BOUCHER
Laboratoire de sciences phonétiques
Université de Montréal
Canada

The linguistic variables of deceit in spontaneous speech: a discriminant analysis

Deceit has been defined as a deliberate attempt to create by a communicative act, and without forewarning, a belief that is untrue or inaccurate. This presentation deals with deceit in a situation where speakers recount passed events that cannot be immediately verified. In this context, a number of linguistic variables can serve to reveal a speaker’s intention to deceive, thereby establishing the need for investigators to verify recounted events. A comprehensive bibliography will be made available on 41 variables that have been proposed. Of these, only 13 linguistic variables present acceptable degrees of reliability and do not require complex acoustic analyses beyond phonetic transcription.Considering these variables, an experiment was performed with the purpose of isolating the specific aspects that can discriminate deceitful from truthful discourse across speakers and “themes”. Twenty university students were asked to recount, in turn, events that took place and that did not take place in five different places (in a hospital, at school, in a bar, on vacation, and at work). The recorded speech provided a corpus of 200 three-to-five minute discourses varying in theme, with half representing truthful and half inaccurate oruntrue accounts. At present, 50% of the recorded samples representing ten subjects have been transcribed in ASCII format using particular coding. Descriptive statistics were derived by applying routines of an available freeware program. Paired t-tests for the analysed samples show significant differences on given variables such as hesitation, lexical repetition (type/token) and utterance length. A multivariate discriminant analysis will be applied to determine the successfulness of linear combinations of variables in correctly classifying deceitful discourse. This analysis will also determine how classification rates vary with individuals and themes. The discussion centers on the advantage of speech over written testimony as a means of soliciting variations in the particular variables that can reveal deceit. The functional variables presented in this report will be further applied to real-life testimony and confessions recorded during criminal investigations.

Ronald R. BUTTERS
Linguistics Program
Duke University
USA

The Credentials of Linguists Testify in American Trademark Litigation

The standards for admitting linguists as expert witnesses in civil and criminal cases in American courts are, in the end, set on a case-by-case basis by the courts having jurisdiction, and in recent years courts have seemingly been reluctant to exclude proposed linguistics “experts” as unqualified. In most cases, a doctoral degree in linguistics, however ancient, from an established university can qualify a linguist as an “expert,” regardless of areas of specialization, publication record, teaching and/or research experience, or scholarly record of specific expertise in forensic linguistics. This paper describes several recent cases in American trademark litigation in which the methodologies employed by the linguistic experts were clearly deficient, and in which the deficiencies appear to stem from inadequate training on the part of the putative expert.

For example, a recent report on “the likelihood of confusion” of two trademarks listed seven dictionaries and asserted, “The review, consultation, and analysis of the above-mentioned reference materials are the normal, usual, and generally accepted steps that a professional linguist would take to be able to give the opinions that I give here.” Of these seven dictionaries, four were published before 1971, and the other three (never mentioned further in the report) are specialized dictionaries. Not only did the report’s author make no use of the current Oxford English Dictionary or any contemporary unabridged American dictionaries, she also failed to examine any empirical primary data (e.g., LexisNexis, ProQuest, online search engines). Yet she offered conclusions with respect not only to likelihood of confusion (with no discussion of the phonology of the two marks) but also that at least one of the marks “is not generic,” “is not at all descriptive,” “is at least suggestive,” and “may well be arbitary or fanciful”—all legal conclusions, not linguistic ones.

The record of qualifications of this particular expert indicates why her report was so deficient. She did receive a doctorate in Linguistics in 1983 from a reputable institution of higher learning. However, in the 23 years since then, according to her c.v., she has published only two articles in the field of acoustic phonetics, the last nearly 20 years ago. She has not had a tenure-track academic appointment of any kind, and has almost no teaching experience. Her career shows no indication of any sort of sustained or even sporadic research program. She lists no presentations of her scholarly work at any meetings of professional societies or even membership in any professional societies. A check of the membership roles of the Linguistic Society of America indicates that she has so little interest in the profession that she does not belong even to this basic professional American society. With respect to the subfields within linguistics that are most relevant to the work that she has undertaken in this Declaration, she is particularly unqualified. Her training two decades ago at UCLA was in acoustic phonetics, and she makes use of no such expertise in her report, relying primarily upon the published work of lexicographers, a field in which she has had little if any real training and has demonstrated no professional interest in the past quarter century. She does not belong to the professional organizations of greatest interest to someone professionally qualified in lexicography, e.g., the Dictionary Society of North America, the American Dialect Society, and the American Name Society. She shows no professional interest in societies of linguists who are interested in the intersection of linguistics and the law, e.g., the Law and Society Association, the International Association of Forensic Linguists, or even the International Association of Forensic Phonetics, the society that is closest to the bulk of her legal work (the eight cases from the 1980s and early 1990s listed on here c.v. having to do with voice identification by means of acoustic phonetics).

While this case is extreme, it indicates a serious confusion among at least some attorneys and courts about the qualifications needed to testify meaningfully about such issues. While no credentialing agency exists in America for forensic linguistics, at minimum there is a need for a published account—along the lines described above—of at least some recognized minimal standards that the legal profession might use in screening putative linguistic experts.

Jan CHOVANEC
Department of English and American Studies
Masaryk University in Brno
Czech Republic

The Same Though Different: Tobacco Health Warnings in European Community Member States

Legislative instruments frequently explicitly modify the precise forms of language encountered in public places. One such major change of the use of public language was brought about in all member states of the EU as a result of Directive 2001/37/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 June 2001 on ‘the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the member states concerning the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco products’. The directive specified the precise wording of tobacco health warnings which would appear (in their respective translations) on the packaging of tobacco products in all EU countries.

In this presentation, tobacco health warnings are considered in the context of general product warnings with a focus on the linguistic forms used to express this complex speech act. Particular attention is paid to the specifications for such warnings laid down in the relevant directive and how they are reflected in national legislatures. A comparative approach reveals several subtle linguistic differences between the wordings of health warnings found on tobacco products in various EU countries. The differences are sometimes due to mistranslation; at other times they arise from permitted modifications of the warnings within the bounds set by the source directive. They may even arise because the text of the warnings is not copied verbatim. In all cases documented, deviations from the source text of the EC directive weaken the strength of the warnings, and may therefore be regarded as somehow favourable to the tobacco industry.

G. Burns COOPER
University of Alaska Fairbanks
USA

Idea Density as a Marker of Authorship

The widely publicized "Nun Study" found significant correlation between stylistic features in young women's autobiographical narratives and their likelihood of suffering from Alzheimer's Disease much later in life (Snowdon et al, JAMA 21 February 1996). Although the reasons for this correlation are far from well understood, it suggests that these linguistic features connect in some way to persistent mental, even neurological, characteristics. The strongest correlation was with "idea density" (defined as "average number of ideas expressed per ten words. . ."). It seems worth exploring, then, whether idea density (or semantic density) is a measurement that could be useful for authorship identification studies. The present paper offers a first step toward that exploration by investigating further the extent to which semantic density in writing is stable over time. It examines selected personal letters of several writers over the course of their adult lives to see if the semantic density of a given writer over time varies significantly less than the variation across authors. (This paper does not examine variation across genres, but of course that will eventually need to be investigated as well.) If idea density does indeed correlate robustly with individuals at different times and in different situations, it could be a useful marker of authorship when combined with other indicators.

Embedding and taboo terms in criminal trials

This paper is an examination of embedded discourse in a criminal trial, especially when it includes taboo terms. The study is based primarily on an October 2003 sexual assault trial in Fairbanks, Alaska, involving four defendants and two victims. Because of the nature of the alleged crime, it was necessary for attorneys and witnesses to make explicit references to sexual acts. These references ranged from technical to euphemistic to taboo. At times, it was clear why taboo words were chosen, as for example when a witness did not understand the relatively technical term “ejaculate,” or when a police interview was quoted verbatim. At other times, as in closing arguments, it seemed to be a matter of the speaker’s stylistic choice. A second factor to be examined is embedding of statements, especially in indirect discourse. Again, because of the nature of the case, some quotative statements (e.g., “She said that he. . .”) were inevitable; however, some of these, especially in embedded questions and/or negatives, could become quite complex, to the extent that the witness’s and jury’s comprehension might be in doubt. Finally, the paper will look at the effects of using taboo words in embedded statements and questions, as in the following: “Brandon testified that George did not say that one of the girls had given him head and he had fucked the other one.” Although the statement is ostensibly intended to help exculpate a defendant, it is questionable whether it would actually do so in the minds of the jury. Similar issues are raised by other statements and questions in the trial.

Shawn M. CLANKIE
Otaru University of Commerce
Japan

Linguistic and Legal Divergence in Trade Name Genericization

The shift in meaning from specific to generic in brand names goes by a variety of terms including genericization, dilution, or genericide depending upon the position one holds towards this type of semantic shift. Each year a wide selection of brand names, appellations, and even common nouns are fought over in courts of law as parties spar for a degree of ownership and control in language. Linguists on the other hand have generally taken a hands-off approach to considerations of this type of ownership in language. As such, there is frequently a divergence found in what the laws allow and what is actually demonstrated in the language. The goal of this talk is to focus on how trademark laws, particularly those dealing with brand name genericization, fail to account for how language works. Through detailed examples using both domestic (U.S.) and international court cases, the author seeks to demonstrate how these divergences developed and what might be done to at least make the courts aware of data that might be useful in determining whether or not a name has become generic.

Ioana COSTACHE
University of Bucharest, Romania and
University of Oxford, UK

The Ultimate Pledge: a diachronic view of performativity in Romanian legal documents

This is an investigation of performativity in legal documents in the framework of conceptual blending developed by Fauconnier and Turner. The corpus under investigation spans more than 500 years and consists of a limited range of legal text types. Performativity permeates legal discourse both at the individual level (contracts, pledges, wills, donations etc. concluded between natural persons) and at the institutional level (church donations, international treaties and alliances). In earlier documents (15th to 18th century), performativity is achieved mainly by rhetorical and lexical means, such as repetition and elaborate curses meant "to enhance the performative potential of documents as autonomous communicative acts" (Danet&Bogoch 1992), while in 19th and 20th century documents it tends to be achieved by grammatical means, such as tense. Performativity in Romanian legal discourse may also be influenced by interference from Latin, Church Slavonic, French and (more recently) English.

"Every organism is a prisoner of its evolutionary history." Richard Southwood

Janet COTTERILL
Centre for Language and Communication
Cardiff University
UK

‘You do not have to say anything...’: Instructing the jury on the defendant’s right to silence in the English criminal justice system

The right to silence is both a fundamental and a controversial element of the legal process. Suspects and defendants are reminded repeatedly of this entitlement, from the moment of arrest, where the UK police caution explains that ‘you do not have to say anything...’, to the right of defendants in British criminal trials to decline to testify in their own defence. However, the decision to remain silent is not a risk-free strategy for the suspect/defendant in the English legal system. Unlike in the US, where criminal juries are instructed that they may not draw any inferences from such a decision, recent changes in the UK mean that English juries are now instructed that they may draw ‘appropriate inferences’ from the defendant’s failure to speak. This paper draws on a corpus of oral jury instructions taken from English criminal trials where the defendant chose to invoke the right to silence at interview and/or during the subsequent trial. It analyses the communicative strategies employed by trial judges in explaining this aspect of the law to juries in their final jury instructions, and includes a discussion of some of the implications of this apparent erosion of the right to silence for both suspects and defendants.

Richard L. CREECH
Attorney at Law
Washington, DC
USA

Missing the Mark: Assessing Trademarks for Distinctiveness and Descriptiveness in Europe’s Multilingual Environment

Under Article 7(1) of the European Community’s regulation on trademarks, a trademark may not be registered if it is “devoid of any distinctive character” or if it consists exclusively of words “which may serve, in trade, to designate the kind, quality, quantity, intended purpose, value, geographical origin or the time of production of” the associated goods. Determining whether a proffered mark is either “distinctive” or merely “descriptive” can be difficult enough when the inquiry involves only one language. The EC, however, is robustly multi-lingual, and the trademark regulation provides in Article 7(2) that a trademark is unregisterable “notwithstanding that the grounds of non-registerability obtain in only part of the Community.” Consequently, in determining the validity of a trademark, a court should have regard for how a mark is understood by speakers of all the different languages spoken in the Community. Advocate General Jacobs illustrated this process in OHIM v. William Wrigley Jr. Co. (2003) as follows: “the English word ‘handy,’ meaning easy to handle, might be seen as a possible word mark, or part of a mark, for a mobile phone. Since however that word is commonly used in Germany to designate a mobile phone, it could not be registered as a Community mark.” The European Court of Justice has resisted multi-lingual assessment of trademarks in several cases, however. In Proctor & Gamble Co. v. OHIM (1999), the ECJ stated that in order to assess the mark “Baby Dry,” “it was “necessary to put oneself in the shoes of an English-speaking consumer.” In the Wrigley case, the Advocate General refused to engage in a multi-lingual analysis of the meaning of “Doublemint” chewing gum, rejecting an argument advanced by the German government that regard should be had for German consumers, whose numbers exceed those of any other member state, and who would associate “Doublemint” with the descriptive German compound Doppelminze.

Even when limiting itself to one language, the EC’s legal bodies have faced the difficulty of choosing a language in which to evaluate a mark. In a recent case concerning a company from the United Kingdom that opposed the use of Laotian and Thai words in a competitor’s food-related trademark, Oriental Kitchen SARL v. OHIM (2003), the Court of First Instance insisted on analyzing the challenged mark in terms of its meaning to an anglophone population and rejected arguments concerning the understanding of the mark in the minds of Europe’s Indochinese population. This paper will examine the European Community’s confusing (and confused) jurisprudence concerning multi-lingual understandings of trademarks and will compare it with the approaches taken by national trademark authorities in similar circumstances. Particular attention will be paid to a decision issued by the Polish Patent Office in 2003 in which it rejected the effort of Esprit International, which holds the French-language mark “Esprit,” to obtain the cancellation of the English-language mark “Spirit.” Esprit International argued that “Spirit” could not co-exist with “Esprit” in Poland because both words would be translated into the same word in Polish. The Patent Office, however, disregarded the uniformity of the Polish translations and examined the marks as they would be understood by speakers of English and French.

Yocheved DEUTCH
English Department, Netanya College and
Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University
Israel

Linguistic Minorities’ Rights in Israel

The Israeli case demonstrates the important contribution of domestic law to the recognition of minorities’ positive language rights. Language policy in Israel involves an intricate relationship between law, ideology and practice. Ideology and practice reflect the character of Israel as a nation-state where Hebrew is perceived as a national symbol. At the same time, there are several groups in Israel which speak other languages including a considerable minority of Arabic speaking citizens for whom Arabic bears a national significance. The national significance of both Hebrew and Arabic has created an ideological discord which has had an unavoidable influence on legal policy making authorities. However, in spite of this ideological discord, legislation and court decisions have recognized and granted group differentiated rights to the Arab minority. Speakers of other languages, who differ substantially from the Arabic speaking citizens, have also been granted language rights according to their particular needs.

The arguments will be illustrated by legislation and leading court decisions on the issue of minorities’ language rights in Israel. Both legislation and court decisions demonstrate the complexity of granting language rights in a nation-state and also how conflicting rights are balanced for reaching a compromising solution.

Agnieszka DOCZEKALSKA
Law Department
European University Institute
Italy

Production and application of multilingual law. The principle of equality of authentic texts and the value of subsequent translation

The phenomenon of multilingual law stems from official multilingualism, which usually requires not only that the law should be enacted in all official languages, but also that texts of a single legal instrument expressed in official languages be treated as equally authentic. The principle of equality of authentic texts (PEAT) influences the way of production of all language versions of a single instrument and the way of interpretation of multilingual law. In the case of ‘subsequent translation’ – when not all language versions of a single multilingual instrument are drafted at the same time – translation is prepared and authenticated once the drafting and authentication process for the particular legal act has been completed (e.g., EU primary and secondary legislation had to be translated and authenticated after each enlargement).

In this paper I consider the value of subsequent translation from both a normative and a descriptive perspective in order to bring out how PEAT should work in theory, and how it works in practice. I focus, first, on the production of subsequent translation, and second, on the application and interpretation of multilingual European law in the courts (the ECJ and the national courts), especially on the question whether subsequent translation contributes to the common meaning of a single instrument. While the normative approach explains how multilingual law should be drafted and interpreted, the descriptive one deals with English and Polish translations of EU primary legislation and the court interpretation of EU law after the enlargements. With this two-sided analysis in place, I tackle the question whether all language versions are actually treated as equally valid authentic texts. Finally, I make some suggestions about how PEAT could be better implemented in the complex process of drafting and interpreting multilingual law.

Jan ENGBERG
Aarhus School of Business
Denmark

Modelling Development of Legal Concepts

Traditionally, studies of communication via domain specific texts like legal texts concentrate upon synchronic issues, describing the actual state of a specialised communicative system. This is to a large extent due to basic semiotic assumptions about domain specific communication as being highly rational, overcoming possible sources of misunderstanding by ruling out subjective interpretation of linguistic input as a possibility. To push it to extremes: Understanding in domain specific settings like the law is traditionally seen to come about as a fairly automatic process, based on the fact that sender and receiver share knowledge about the meaning of the words used in the communication because of the specialised training etc. This conception of the process of understanding is reflected in such claims like, e.g., that the plain meaning of the law is the only possible guidance for interpreting it, or that a legal translator must (and can) translate just the exact words of a legal document and thus achieve the only correct translation of it (for references and discussion, see Engberg 2003 and 2004a).

However, the above mentioned description of the process of understanding is not in accordance with the actual facts of domain specific communication. E.g., legal communication functions perfectly, although almost every court case consists in a challenge to the meaning of concepts contained in legal documents, which means that actually the meaning of legal concepts is potentially moving constantly. This is especially visible when looking at cases for the European Court of Justice (Engberg 2004b).

In my paper, I will present an analysis of conceptual change and its reflection in different texts based on the model of a recent Danish case. The conflict was about whether the purchase by bank managers of shares of their own bank just before publishing that the bank was to be taken over by another bank was to count as insider trading and went through all three possible Danish court levels. The analysis demonstrates traits of a model of understanding specialised texts which, as opposed to traditional models, is based on post-modernist thinking, cognitivism and constructionism. I intend to show that such a model is better equipped to describe dynamic processes, as it does not presuppose identical concepts in the mind of the persons communicating. Instead, it works with mutual construction of knowledge on the basis of different conceptual background with sufficient overlaps.

References:

• Engberg, Jan (2003): Legal meaning assumptions – what are the consequences for legal interpretation and legal translation? In: International Journal of the Semiotics of Law 15 - 4 (Special issue: The (Ab)Use of Language in Legal Discourse); 375-388.
• Engberg, Jan (2004a): Über die Notwendigkeit, bei der Beurteilung von Übersetzungsqualität Linguistik zu betreiben. In: Colliander, Peter / Hansen, Doris / Zint, Ingeborg (Hrsg.): Linguistik - Übersetzungswissenschaft - Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Heidelberg 2004: Groos; 63-84.
• Engberg, Jan (2004b): Statutory Texts as Instances Of Language(s) – Consequences and Limitations on Interpretation. In: Brooklyn Journal of International Law, vol. 29, no. 3; 1135-1166.

Robertha Sandra EVANS
The University of the West Indies
Trinidad and Tobago

Linguistic Disadvantage and Disempowerment: wavet douvan poule

During the 150 years prior to 1803, there was a drawn out power struggle between the French and the English for ownership of the island of St. Lucia. Over this period, these two powers each enjoyed possession of the island seven times. Finally in 1814, the island was ceded to the British for the last time and remained a British colony until its independence in 1979. By 1842, English was established as the only official language of St. Lucia, which implied that it was to be used in all official social domains. The legal system logically adopted English as its language of operation. However, at that time, a large section of the St. Lucian population remained monolingual speakers of a new language, a French-lexicon Creole, which had developed during the period of French rule. This Creole is etymologically linked to French but is not mutually intelligible with either French or English. The Anglicization of the legal system placed French-lexicon Creole speakers at a distinct disadvantage, primarily because they were excluded in English.

This paper is based on recent research in the current linguistic practices of the legal system in St. Lucia. It examines some of the specific ways in which these common practices continue to place French-lexicon Creole speaking defendants at a clear disadvantage before the law, particularly for cases in which they are not legally represented. Special emphasis will be placed on disadvantage engendered by the lack of an official language policy for the legal system, the absence of court-trained interpreters, the appointment of foreign magistrates and Act 926 of the 2004 St. Lucia Criminal Code. Ultimately this paper seeks to examine the accepted practice of using English as the sole language of the law in a bilingual or multilingual linguistic environment.

Eduardo D. FAINGOLD
University of Tulsa
USA

Language in the Constitution

This paper analyzes 187 constitutions from around the world for legal language defining the obligations of the nation and the language rights of its citizens. “Undivided” nations, e.g. Uruguay and the United States, adopt a “hands-off” approach constitutional policy towards language obligations and rights because such nations possess (or claim to possess) a strong sense of national identity and no group of citizens having or seeking autonomy or secession. On the other hand, “divided” nations, e.g. Belgium, Canada and South Africa, adopt a “hands-on” constitutional policy, because they possess unassimilated language groups or groups having or seeking autonomy or secession.

Carmen López FERRERO & Evarista-García PENA
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)
Spain

Analysis of Legal Discourse in an On-Line Writing Centre

Since legal documents are destined to two different receivers, that is, the legal professional and the citizen, we focus on two future professional users of the on-line writing centre, the jurist and the legal translator. In this framework, it is appropriate to elaborate a tool that meets the language and cognitive needs of either type of users. Since in the Spanish University there is not much practice on legal writing, this tool aims at covering this loophole.

The aim of this paper it to show the relevance of the analysis leading to the drafting of legal discourse in Spanish in an on-line writing center. At the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) we are developing a virtual hypertext tool to assess the quality and precision of legal writing. The Interdisciplinary group of teachers and researchers is formed by linguists and legal specialists from the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The proposal is backed by the UPF Measures for Quality and Innovation Education Programme, envisaged to improve relevant skills shared by a great and diverse amount of university students.

As far as on-line resources related to legal discourse are concerned, nowadays, there are different kinds of tools available in internet, particularly those related to law vocabulary and legal textual forms. Although we find a lot of web pages that try to deal with the lexical aspect or else with the textual aspect as based on legal forms, there are few explanations on the process of writing and understanding legal discourses for different purposes and in different situations. Therefore, our aim is to help the users of legal discourse to analyse it (in order to understand it) and to compose texts in a conscious, suitable and professional-like linguistic form.

Our didactic proposal is the result of the analysis of the needs shown by two types of user, the jurist and the legal translator, who have to interpret, write and translate legal instruments. We show different types of didactic itineraries to cover the cognitive and linguistic skills, focusing on the specificities of the two types of user. More specifically, the activities relate to judgements and contracts and consist of a whole range of exercises: the macroestructural analysis of the text, vocabulary exercises, the division of legal discourse according to functional criteria, production and eliciting exercises, etc.

The platform has been organized around three main categories: (i) Writing skills (Técnicas de escritura), (ii) Text models (Modelos de textos) and (iii) Resources (Recursos). The first category, Writing skills, is arranged for activities and resources on legal terminology, style and the most common mistakes. Text models contains definitions, structure descriptions, analysed real examples and activities based on the most usual legal forms (case-law, statements of claim, statute law, reports, contracts and labour agreements). Finally, the third category, Resources, contains up-dated information on internet tools useful to legal drafting. We ground our proposal on the theoretical framework of Discourse Analysis, specifically resorting to parallel-stage interaction model of text production (Beaugrande 1984, Trimble 1985, among others), professional genre analysis (Bathia 1993, Gunnarsson et al. 1997, Geluykens & Pelsmaeker 1999), writing research (Hyland 2002) and social interaction discourse studies (Van Dijk 1997). These studies focus on three relevant aspects to our didactic application: 1) the process of understanding and producing a discourse at different levels of text organization, 2) the specific structure of discourse genres as recognizable textual forms that respond to social needs, and 3) the types of professional interactions in legal contexts and their social functions.

An on-line writing centre allows each user to choose the type of exercise that he/she needs and to work autonomously to improve his/her skills. Furthermore, a specific (legal discourse) on-line writing centre focuses on a productive area of social practice with still few resources on the Spanish-speaking context.

References:

• Bathia, V.K. (1993). Analysing genre: language use in professional settings. Londres: Longman Group UK.
• Beaugrande, R. A. de (1984). Text Production. Towards a Science of Composition. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
• Geluykens, R. & Pelsmaekers, K. (1999). Discours in Professional Contexts. München, Newcastle : Lincom Europa.
• Gunnarsson, B-L., Linell, P., & Nordberg, B. (Eds.) (1997). The Construction of Professional Discourse. Londres, Nueva York: Longman.
• Hyland, K. (2002). Teaching and Researching Writing. London: Longman, Pearson Education.
• Trimble, L. (1985). English for Science and Technology. A discourse approach,Cambridge: CUP.
• Van Dijk, Teun A. (comp.) (1997) Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse Studies : A Multidisciplinary Introduciont, vol. 2, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi. Sage Publications. [Spanish translation (2000). El discurso como interacción social. Barcelona: Gedisa.]

Dr Lysbeth FORD
Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education
&
Dominic McCORMACK
MARLUK Link-Up
Australia

The Murrinh-patha Legal Glossary: a bridge between laws.

This paper reports on a ground-breaking project to produce a glossary of commonly-used English legal terms in an Australian Indigenous language.

The project is a response to the statistically significant incarceration rates of Indigenous Australians, particularly in the language area considered, whose limited command or complete lack of English puts them at a severe disadvantage when they are confronted head-on by the Australian legal system. Magistrates, police and legal aid services regularly find themselves hamstrung by the lack of a common language to communicate with defendants, detainees and clients alike. Indigenous interpreters, while fluent in the first language of their clients, often lack sufficient specific English competency to be able to decipher the meanings of English legal terms.

Funded by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and The Law Society of the Northern Territory Public Purposes Trust, the project was undertaken by Ford, a linguist with sixteen years experience in languages of the Darwin-Daly River region of the Northern Territory, several Murrinh-patha elders, John Sheldon, a legal aid lawyer based in Darwin, and McCormack, a lawyer fluent in Murrinh-patha.

Murrinh-patha was chosen because it, rather than English or Kriol, is the lingua franca of approximately 2,500 Indigenous Australians in the Thamarrurr Region, 400km south-west of Darwin in the Daly River Aboriginal Land Trust area of the Northern Territory of Australia, and the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

The project has had several successful outcomes:

- a legal glossary of the most commonly used English legal terms;
- increased understanding of the legal process by the Murrinh-patha elders who worked on the project;
- increased understanding of the subtleties of Murrinh-patha by the non-Indigenous researchers.

The glossary has also proved a useful pedagogical tool in the training of Indigenous interpreters, because it consists largely of paraphrases which provide an Australian Indigenous context for each legal concept. The rigour with which it was conducted is evident in the morpheme by morpheme glosses provided for each Murrinh-patha translation.

Stanislaw GOZDZ-ROSZKOWSKI
Department of English Language
University of Lodz
Poland

Patterns and meanings in legal language: studying discoursal functions of recurrent word combinations in contractual instruments

This presentation has been envisaged as a work-in-progress report on a project devoted to the description of collocational variation within the English legal discourse. In this study, the focus will be on recurrent word combinations in the so-called 'contractual instruments', i.e.everything from assignments to licensing agreements to warranties).

The use of collocations and fixed expressions is regarded as a marker of proficient language use of a particular register (Bamberg 1983, McCulley 1985, Haswell 1991). Word combinations in special languages have attracted the attention of scholars working in a variety of different fields and methodologies (terminology, phraseology, lexicography, LSP etc., see for instance Bergenholtz & Tarp 1995, Cohen 1986, Heid 1994, L’Homme 1995, Kjaer 1990, Gozdz-Roszkowski 2004).

This paper aims to provide a systematic, corpus-based and frequency-driven account of fixed recurrent word combinations in the legal genre of contracts. The research questions can be summed up as follows: (1) what are the word-combinations characteristic of this particular text genre and (2) how do these word-combinations relate to particular pragmatic and discoursal functions.

Methodologically, this study can be placed within the quantitative research based on the analysis of language corpora. This approach relies on a search tool that identifies lexical co-occurrences of different length at different cut-off frequency (Altenberg 1993, Biber et al. 1999). Indeed, lexical bundles have been now recognised as an important indicator of register differences (Biber 2004, see also Cortes 2004). One of the indirect aims of the study is to assess the applicability of the concept of lexical bundle in the analysis of highly specialised, technical text types. Finally, implications of the findings for teaching legal English, as well as suggested paths for future research will be discussed.

References:

• Altenberg, B. (1993) “Recurrent word combinations in spoken English“. In: D‘Arcy, J. (ed.). Proceedings of the Fifth Nordic Association for English Studies Conference. Reykjavik: University of Island
• Bamberg, B (1983) “What makes a text coherent? College Composition and Communication, 34 (4), 417-429.Bergenholtz, H. and Tarp, S, Manual of Specialised Lexicography, Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins
• Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999). The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
• Biber, D. (2004) “Lexical bundles in academic speech and writing“, In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B (ed.) Practical Applications in Language and Computers PALC 2003, Peter Lang, 165-178
• Cohen, B. (1986) Lexique de cooccurrents; Bourse – conjoncture economique. Montreal: Linguatech.
• Cortez, Viviana (2004) “Lexical bundles in published and student disciplinary writing: Examples from history and biology. English for Specific Purposes 23, 397-423.
• Gozdz-Roszkowski, S. (2004) “Multi-word lexical units in legal genres – the pedagogic perspective“,In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.), Practical Applications in Language and Computers PALC 2003, Peter Lang, 401-413
• Haswell, R. (1991) Gaining ground in college writing: tales of development and interpretation. Dallas: Sothern Methodist University Press
• Heid, Ulrich (2001) “Collocations in Sublanguage Texts: Extraction from Corpora“. In: Handbook of Terminology Management, vol.2, Sue Ellen Wright, Gerhard Budin (eds.), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
• Kjaer, A. L. (1990) “Context-conditioned word combinations in legal language“.Terminology Science and Research vol 1, no.1-2: 21-32
• L‘Homme, M. (1998) “Caracterisation des combinaisons lexicales specialisees par rapport aux collocations de langue generale“. In: Fontenelle et al. (Euralex 1998), 513-522.
• McCulley, G. (1985) “Writing quality, coherence, and cohesion”. Research in the Teaching of English, 19(3), 269-282

Syugo HOTTA
Ritsumeikan University, Japan and
Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada

Morphosyntactic Structure of Japanese Trademarks and their Distinctiveness: A New Model for Linguistic Analysis of Trademarks

In this paper, I will examine two Japanese trademark infringement cases in which the morphosyntactic structure of trademarks was at issue and criticize the standards currently employed by the courts in trademark infringement cases to test the confusion of disputed trademarks. Then, a new analytical model for morphosyntactic structure of trademarks will be proposed which exploits markedness conventions redefined in terms of Grice’s conversational maxims (Grice 1975) and the cognitive load theory (Sweller 1988). In the two cases to be discussed in the paper, the courts scrutinized trademarks involving compounds as to what counts as a “distinctive part” of the compounds in the trademarks. Identifying the distinctive part of trademarks is of great significance, since it is that part that often determines the result of a case. For example, since the trademark law protects a mark that is distinctive from others, if one of the morphemes of the linguistic expression used in a trademark is by itself a distinctive part of the trademark, the use of the morpheme by another person will be judged an infringement of the trademark ownership. On the other hand, if the word or compound of a trademark is a distinctive part as a whole, the use of a part of the word, i.e., a morpheme, may not be judged an infringement, because it is the whole expression, not the part of it, that is distinctive and thereby is granted a legal protection. The Japanese courts have used an intuitive, misleading method to decide the distinctive part of a trademark without recourse to an expert’s analysis. In one of the cases I will discuss in the paper, the court clearly reached a wrong conclusion by providing a lay analysis of linguistic structure of trademarks.

I will challenge the courts’ analysis with empirical evidence based on a survey. The analytical model I will propose in this paper is designed to help identify the distinctive part of trademark more systematically, elegantly, and more easily for non-linguistic experts to use than the one in use now. I will also show that the new model is in fact applicable not only to marks involving compounds but to those with a wide variety of linguistic structure, and beyond Japanese language. For example, I will take up the McSleep Inn case in the US in which the use of the bound morpheme Mc- was disputed, and demonstrate that the same analysis can be applied to it.

This study has both theoretical and practical implications: It contributes to the legal practice in trademarks in that the model will provide a more consistent, empirically-grounded, and easily-applicable standard for the analysis of linguistic structure of trademarks, which accordingly facilitates just administration of law; the morphosyntactic analysis proposed in this paper incorporates the three independently developed theories mentioned above, namely, markedness conventions, Grice’s conversational maxims and the cognitive load theory. Such an analysis is novel to linguistic theory itself and therefore adds to the scholarly discourse of linguistics as well.

References:

• Grice, H. Paul 1975. Logic and conversation. In Cole, P., and J. L. Morgan, eds. Speech Acts. pp. 41-58, New York : Academic Press
• Sweller, John, 1988. Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning, Cognitive Science, 12, 257-285.

Marek KADUCZAK
European Commission
Brussels

Comprehensibility of law

Law can be seen, especially by a linguist, as an act of communication between the legislator and the citizens. The message consists in rights and obligations, expressed in legal language and reinforced by the state coercion system. Therefore, for a law to be effective, that message has to be comprehensible for the addressees.

Comprehensibility has been deemed by the European Court of Human Rights an indispensable condition for an act to be a law at all. The Polish Constitutional Court has put it in other words: an incomprehensible law is unconstitutional (violates the principle of rule of law). To define clearly when law is incomprehensible lawyers need linguistic instruments and for the grey-area cases the theory of an act of communication appears to be useful. Those linguistic analyses should not, however, be limited to the laws already existing. The flood of incomprehensible legislation in Poland and in whole Europe makes it more and more urgent to emphasise the linguistic consideration in the course of the legislative process.

The consequences of lack of such consideration in the Polish and EU legislation and some measures that need to be applied will be the subject of this presentation.

Legal drafting and translation under constraints of multilingualism

The European Union is operating in the largest number of official languages among all the international bodies. Quite often it is seen only as a technical problem of translating huge volumes of texts. The question is, however, much deeper.

Firstly, legislation is drafted with consideration for the multilingualism, which means that it has to be fully translatable into all other official languages. Consequently, the drafter has to take into account constraints of other languages and avoid any “idiolinguistic” solutions. Secondly, the draft is translated into other languages, but formally, after an act is adopted, there exist no translations – all linguistic versions are equal originals. It puts on the EU translators the highest possible requirement of producing a “congenial” translation. Moreover, the original draft being a result of political negotiations and being written by a non-linguist, often non-native speaker, its “translations” are frequently of higher linguistic quality than the “original” and in the further process of amending the act the “original” linguistic version happens to be corrected to align it with the “translations”.

Those intricate interrelations between law and language in the EU have resulted in creating a new profession: a lawyer-linguist, a hybrid whose tasks will be one of the main subjects of my presentation.

Wojciech KWARCINSKI
School of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poland

Legal facts, legal acts and legal speech acts

In my paper I am concerned with delimiting a distinctive form of speech acts associated with law within an approach based on speech act theory and a normative theory of law. The basic assumption underlying my presentation is that only an interdisciplinary characterization can guarantee that the insights into the nature of legal speech acts are corroborated also by the world of law from which these acts originate.

Following recent trends in modern jurisprudence, as a starting point in my examination I adopt a dichotomous classification of legal facts into two broad categories: conventional acts and other facts. By reinterpreting Austin’s (1962) performative-constative distinction in line with Nowak’s (1968) conception of conventional acts of different orders, I delimit declarative illocutionary acts and, consequently, institutional speech acts as higher-order conventional acts. Among institutional speech acts, I distinguish a specific class of legal speech acts, i.e. conventional acts of a higher order, intended by the agent(s) to produce legal consequences. This perlocutionary intention manifested in an utterance should, in my view, be identified with the illocutionary force of an utterance and assessed, as far as its social license is concerned, in accordance with legal norms in force in a given legal system. Thus, the existence of legal speech acts crucially relies on a set of constitutive rules established by law. Constitutive rules are then redefined as norms prescribing a specific understanding or reaction to certain acts. In this way, it becomes possible to identify constitutive rules with the directives of sense in Ziembiñski and Zieliñski’s (1992) interpretation and to treat both legal and linguistic aspects of legal speech acts in a uniform way.

Having established the status of legal speech acts, I proceed to review some of the major types of legal speech acts. Although all these acts form a uniform group from a functional point of view, it is possible to assign them to several distinct types depending on various textual and contextual aspects of legal discourse. Application of different criteria enables one to distinguish among legal speech acts such categories as: verbal and non-verbal; locution specific and non-locution specific; singular, multiple and collective; unilateral and cooperative.

Elena Ferran LARRAZ
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)
Spain

Understanding and Writing Legal Documents: The Law Student Versus The Translation Student

As an echo of the debate raised by the Plain English Movement “the law for the legal professional or the law for the citizen” we study the cognitive-linguistic background of two different types of student that are faced with understanding and writing legal instruments: the student of law and the student of legal translation (lay in legal matters).

We make distinctions between the knowledge and skills of both types of student. Particularly, we deal with the main task of the legal professional, that of typifying the facts of the case, as regulated by the rule of law, as compared with the path naturally followed by the translation student with no legal background in order to understand the document to be translated. In fact the latter (lacking conceptual knowledge) has to infer meaning from the pragmatic purpose of the document as it underlies the legal regulation as vehicled by legal discourse.

The pragmatic purpose may appear explicitly in the text and even where it is not made express it is always present as a requirement of the legal document and can be inferred by a certain expertise on the part of the translation student. It is an extra linguistic element that is prior to the linguistic expression and is quite precisely the reason of the message being made known.

The interesting issue is that, as it does not appear in the document, it can be inferred from the legal regulation contained in the legal document in its relation with life and human interest. The translator, immersed in his culture can be trained to relate his knowledge about human motivation as it can inspire the legal regulation the document consists of. Of course, the legal draftsman knows the legal regulation and relies on legal forms when drafting the document. However, we have decided to deal with the pragmatic purpose quite independently from the specialist knowledge. This way we try to show that the student of translation only needs some documentation on the legal institution to infer the pragmatic purpose if he has a certain minimum knowledge of legal discourse as a prototypical abstraction of legal efficacy. Therefore we only deal with the legal provisions applicable to the document superficially although it is true that it is the legal system that allows discourse to become legal, the document attaining this way its regulatory function (regulatory function of the document.

By contrast, the law student has a conceptual knowledge that allows him to conceptualise and typify the institutions as he reads the document, making his reading quicker and more precise.

However, the translation student is geared to predicting the practical purpose of the document by a reading devise that makes him construct meaning by relying on the key elements within the document, that is, the agent and the action and its circumstances as causing necessarily a new legal situation. These simple schemata allow the lay reader to understand legal documents more easily by facilitating most of the tasks performed by the trained reader (minimum documentation, simplification, explanation, synthesis, analysis, deduction, induction…).

We also contrast the linguistic skills of the translation student with those of the will-be-lawyer.

This contrast has resulted in the practical exercises put forward in the ON-LINE WRITING CENTRE of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra within the project led by Carmen López as she explains in the relevant communication submitted also to this conference.

References:

• Beaugrande, R. and Dressler, W. (1997). Introducción a la lingüística del texto. Barcelona: Ariel. (1981)
• Capuscio, G. and Kuguel, I. (2002). “Hacia una tipología del discurso especializado: aspectos teóricos y aplicados”. IN GARCÍA, J. and Fuentes, T. (eds.). Entre la terminología, el texto y la traducción. Salamanca: Almar, pp. 37-73. Cornu, G. (1991). Linguistique juridique. Paris: Montchrestien.
• Dick, R. (1985). Legal drafting in plain language. Toronto: Carswell.
• Dickerson, R. (1986). The Fundamentals of Legal Drafting. Boston: Little Brown.
• Dancette, J. (1995). Parcours de traduction étude expérimentale du processus de compréhension Jeanne Dancette. Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille
• Driedger, E. (1982): “Legislative drafting”. Meta, 25, 3. Montréal: Linguatech Conseil de la langue française. pp. 316-324.
• Engberg, J. and Wolch, R. (1999). “Genre Analysis of Legal Discourse”. Hermes Journal of Linguistics, 22.
• Engberg, J. (2002). “Legal meaning assumptions. What are the consequences for legal interpretation and legal translation?”. In International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 15, Kluwer Law International, pp. 357-388.
• Ferran, E. (2004). Las funciones jurilingüísticas en el documento negocial. Un enfoque pragmático. Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. Tesis Doctoral.
• Flower,L. (1991). Collaboration and the construction of meaning Berkeley: National Center for the Study of Writing.
• Flume, W. (1998). El Negocio Jurídico. Madrid: Fundación Cultural del Notariado

Izabela LIS-LEMAÑSKA
Institute of Neophilology
State School of Higher Vocational Education in P³ock
Poland

Training translators/ interpreters at university level: how to meet the challenge?

The object of this paper is to show the influence of Poland’s accession to the European Union on the changes in the situation of certified translators/interpreters in our country. They have always dealt with translating personal or professional documents not to mention other texts or letters requiring to be certified as true and original copies of their originals written in a foreign language. Nowadays one can observe a growing interest in translating documents full of legal and economic terms, just like inquiries, orders, sale conditions, contracts and agreements concluded between Polish and foreign companies. At the same time more and more foreign companies are interested in investing in Polish market.

Not only, however, does this situation create new working opportunities for certified translators but also makes them still improve their language skills to become really perfect in the field of both law and economics. Therefore, it is of great importance to provide all the university students of modern philology who wish for becoming translators/ interpreters with appropriate knowledge and skills preparing them for that demanding profession.

This paper is also a brief survey of the actual state of university training offered to groups of interested students. Types of professional training available at Polish universities are discussed focussing mainly on English departments vaunting to be one of the most popular philological departments in Poland nowadays. Furthermore, the paper tries to assess whether university training in the field of translation is at this stage regarded as sufficient, and if not – what can be done to enrich it in new practical and theoretical content necessary for our graduates to be treated as first-class specialists translating/interpreting legal and economic texts.

Aleksandra MATULEWSKA
School of Translation, Interpreting and Languages
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poland

The macrostructure and register of English and Polish testaments

This paper presents the macrostructure of Polish and English testaments (Hughes, Varó 2002) in the aspect of translation. The following types of testaments are analyzed: (i) holograph ones, (ii) allograph ones, and (iii) testaments in the form of notarial acts. The following testamentary parts are discussed: (i) the headings, (ii) the testator’s identification clause, (iii) the date of execution, (iv) the prior will revocation clause, (v) the executor appointment clause, (vi) the debt clause, (vii) the property distribution clause, (viii) the common disaster clause, (ix) the survivorship clause, (x) the guardian appointment clause, (xi) the funeral arrangement clause, (xii) the severability clause, and (xiii) the attestation clause. The language and vocabulary used in both Polish and English testaments are researched into. The conclusions are that the historically conditioned differences in legal realities both in Poland (the impact of the partitions and the Communist regime) and the English-speaking countries (Mellinkoff 1963) affect the structure and contents of wills significantly. Thus, Polish wills executed by the notary public are more similar to British and American ones. However, wills executed by common people without legal education are made intuitively. As a consequence, many legal terms which appear in them are used in an inappropriate way. In conclusion, the author formulates the hypothesis that in Polish there is the quasi-legal language which is used in holograph testaments. The construction of such wills may be very difficult (Rayar 1993). However, under the Polish Civil Code of 23 April 1964 the intentions of the testator are taken into account while English wills must stand alone. Finally, the Model of Pragmatic Translation of Legal Terms (Kierzkowska 2002) is applied to show the problems connected with the necessity to construe wills written in the quasi-legal language.

References:

• Hughes, B., Varó, A. E., 2002. Legal Translation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
  Kierzkowska, D. 2002. T³umaczenie prawnicze. Warsaw: TEPIS Publishing House.
  Mellinkoff, D. 1963. The Language of the Law. Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company.
  Rayar, L. 1993. Translating Law: Method or Madness? In: International Forum of Legal Translation 1992. Proceedings. Warsaw: Polish Society of Economic, Legal, and Court Translators TEPIS, (62-71).

Fallou NGOM
Modern & Classical Languages
Western Washington University
USA

Issues In Using (Socio) Linguistic Evidence To Determine Nationality: The Case Of Sierra Leonean And Liberian Fula & Mandingo Asylum Seekers

More and more governments use language analysis as part of the information used to determine the national origin of Fula and Mandingo asylum seekers who claim to be from Sierra Leone and Liberia. However, the language analysis reports (used by authorities to decide whether to grant or deny asylum in some cases) are often written by analysts who may be native speakers, but whose linguistic expertise and training is often quite questionable. Due to the limited number of research dealing with dialectal variations of Fula and Mandingo and the sociolinguistic environments in which they are spoken, these analysts are often considered by government officials to be the only reliable experts. This paper focuses on the case of some Fula and Mandingo asylum seekers who claim to originate from small rural parts of Sierra Leone and Liberia near the Guinean border. First, I examine the evidence provided by the analysts and evaluate their scientific well-foundedness. Second, I discuss some crucial (socio) linguistic aspects that are often not taken into account in the language analysis reports and conclusions. Finally, I address the (socio) linguistic issues that need to be taken into account in order to reach more objective conclusions on such cases.

John Olsson
Forensic Science Program, Nebraska Wesleyan University, USA and
Forensic Linguistics Institute, UK

Suicide notes: can we distinguish the genuine from the simulated?

In this paper I will examine previous discussions on genuine vs. simulated suicide notes, including Shneidman and Farberow (1957), Farberow and Shneidman (1961), Shneidman (1980), Osgood and Walker (1959), Messner and Buckrop (2000) and several papers by AA Leenaars.

I will then construct a model for suicide notes, based in part on Messner and Buckrop's communicative model (itself based on Kenneth Burke’s ‘rhetorical acts’ theory), in addition to deriving some aspects of the model from Shneidman's writings.

Additionally, I will propose several new linguistic categories for consideration in the model, utilising some aspects of Freud's pleasure principle in contrast to the need for quiescence, and the concept of deferred gratification.

I will then present a set of genuine and simulated suicide texts and evaluate those in the light of the model.

References:

• Farberow NL and Shneidman ES. 1961. The Cry for Help. Blakiston Division, McGraw-Hill.
• Jacobs, J. 1967. "A phenomenological study of suicide notes". Social Prob. 15 : 60-72.
• Leenaars AA. Suicide: A Multidimensional Malaise
  (http://www.aeschiconference.unibe.ch/A.A.Leenaars2.htm on 06/02/2005). Lester, G & Lester D. 1971. Suicide: The Gamble with Death. Prentice-Hall. Messner BA and Buckrop JJ. 2000. Restoring Order: Interpreting Suicide through a Burkean Lens. Communication Quarterly, Vol. 48.
• Osgood, C., And Walker, E. G. 1959. "Motivation and language behavior". J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 59 : 58-67.
• Shneidman ES. 1986. Ten commonalities of suicide and their implications for response. Crisis 7:88-93.
• Shneidman. 1980. Death: Current Perspectives. Mayfield.
• Thompson, Kenneth. 1982. Emile Durkheim. London: Tavistock Publications

Esther Pascual
Faculty of Arts
Free University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Fictive interaction in court: On the argumentative power of ‘speaking’ evidence and ‘message sending’ verdicts

Face-to-face interaction is critical in courtroom settings. Law is undoubtedly the profession of rhetoric and in a trial almost everything occurs through the spoken word.

I suggest that this motivates what I have called ‘fictive interaction’ (Pascual 2002). This constitutes the use of the schematic structure of inter-subjective verbal communication as an organizing frame to think and talk about apparent non-interactional realities. In particular, it will be argued that in legal settings one often conceptualizes and presents: i) material evidence as fictively speaking to experts and legal professionals; ii) circumstantial evidence as the (deceased) victim fictively talking to the jury and the court; and iii) the jury’s final verdict as the jurors fictively saying something to the defendant, the victim’s family and/or the community at large. It will be argued that –albeit non-factual– these images of communication serve to present the utterers’ arguments in an economic and powerful manner.

Empirically, the work to be presented is based on different data on three high-profile murder trials in American courts. Specifically, the data mainly consist of: i) the full transcript of and ethnographic notes on a prosecutor’s closing argument and closing argument rebuttal in a domestic violence case; ii) the full transcript and audiovisual images of a prosecutor’s closing argument in a child homicide case; and iii) the full transcript and selected video images of a real jury deliberation in a televised death-penalty case for a double homicide.

Reference:

• Pascual, E. 2002. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in Criminal Courts. Utrecht: LOT, nr. 68.

Frances ROCK
Department of English and Modern Languages
Roehampton University
UK

The Right to Silence, East meets West? National and International Perspectives

Many jurisdictions gather evidence from criminal suspects (detainees) through interviews. Of those jurisdictions, some provide detainees with a right to silence or other protection from self-incrimination which can be evoked before or during those interviews. In some jurisdictions that right is explained by police officers through a scripted warning or caution (see, for example, Shuy, 1997; Berk-Seligson, 2001; Gibbons, 2001). In England and Wales, a scripted caution is used (Home Office, 2004). Rather unusually, the Anglo-Welsh caution not only presents the right to silence, but also presents restrictions to that right and provides a brief indication of the circumstances in which those restrictions apply. This makes for a standardised wording which has been criticise for its complexity and difficulty for both officers who must deliver it and detainees who must respond to it (Clare, Gudjonsson and Harari, 1998; Clare 2003). Perhaps in view of this complexity and difficulty, police officers are asked to explain the caution to those detainees who do not appear to have understood the scripted wording. This requirement for improvised explanation has also attracted criticism (Cotterill, 2000; Russell, 2000).

This paper explores how the Anglo-Welsh cautioning procedure plays out in practice. It examines how police officers explain the wording, using naturally occurring data from police interviews around England and Wales. It also considers how officers and detainees respond to both the process and practice of explanation, using interviews and ethnographic observations gathered inside police stations.

The data analysis begins by briefly illustrating how officers ‘simplify’ the official wording. It demonstrates how they identify and respond to lexical and syntactic features which they believe require explanation. The analysis then focuses on the caution’s discourse sequence and officers’ responses to that sequence. It illustrates and explores patterns in and differences between different officers’ orientations to sequence and their representations of sequence. The examination reveals that responses to discourse sequence are not arbitrary and the data analysis concludes by speculating on officers’ motivations in selecting the sequence and orientation to sequence which they do.

The paper concludes by reconsidering the explanation of the right to silence and its associated concepts from an international perspective. This makes it possible to compare the Anglo-Welsh system with those which either do not use a scripted caution or do not explain or provide a right to silence (Cooke and Phillip, 1998; Kurzon, 1996: Russell, 2000).

Víctor M. González RUIZ
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Spain

Changing the law on marriage: the semantics of tolerance

In January 2005, the Spanish Parliament was presented with a Bill intended to reform marriage law. The new Act, which gives homosexual and heterosexual couples the same rights regarding marriage, will cause a dramatic change in the daily life of many same-sex partners. The strength and extent of this legislative move in social policy contrasts, however, with the few and apparently meaningless modifications to the existing law which the Act-to-be proposes. These changes correspond to a few terminological replacements to be applied in the Spanish Civil Code. According to the new Act, in less than twenty sections of the Code, legislators are to change words referring specifically to the “wife” or the “husband” for terms where no reference is expressly given to the gender of the person who is married. As a result, the Spanish words for “spouses” and “parents” are used as a way to make Civil Code provisions available to all citizens, whatever their sex.

The paper will describe the semantic changes brought about by the reforming Act and will also discuss the relationship between social and legislative reforms and language.

Sanford SCHANE
University of California, San Diego
USA

Legal Fiction and Metaphor

The term “legal fiction” goes back to Roman procedural law where certain pleadings, although untrue, could not be challenged. But a legal fiction is not a lie, for there is no intent to deceive (Fuller). One of its principal functions is to accommodate changes in a law—to maintain the authority of older words by imputing to them a novel interpretation. We examine two well-known legal fictions. One of these is an American fiction, known as the “attractive nuisance” doctrine—that a child who enters onto someone’s property without permission and gets injured is not a trespasser but an invitee. It is presumed that some dangerous condition on the property (e.g. a swimming pool, an unlocked gate) has “invited” the child and, consequently, the landowner becomes liable to the child as if the child were a guest. The other fiction is: “The corporation is a person”. Because corporations can engage in some of the same kinds of legal activities as natural persons (e.g. own property, enter into contracts), laws that apply to people will include corporations where that assumption is not unreasonable. This particular fiction has a venerable history. It occupied the minds of French and German jurists throughout the nineteenth century. Even the United States Supreme Court, on several occasions, has had to confront the thorny question of whether the corporation is a person.

Legal fictions have been called the metaphors of the law (Fuller). I shall apply the notion of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson) to the fictions of the “attractive nuisance” and the “corporation as a person”. I shall show that these metaphors have their foundations in the usage of every-day language. Thus, in ordinary discourse we frequently talk about corporations as though they were persons. For example, nouns denoting institutional entities (as subjects of sentences) can occur with a wide range of verbs depicting human mental states or acts of communication—e.g. “Harvard Law School believes that it may need to raise fees next year”; “Microsoft announced that it is coming out with a new operating system”. I shall take the position that although the law may have discovered the utility of the metaphors of the “attractive nuisance” and of “the corporation as a person”, it did not invent on its own the linguistic imagery. Rather the law has been able to exploit to its advantage and to maximize for its needs conceptualizations that were already deeply embedded within the fabric of language.

Reference:

• Fuller, Lon (1967) Legal fictions, Stanford University Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors we live by, University of Chicago Press.

Melissa SHIH-HUI LIN
Institute of Development of Indigenous Peoples
National Dong Hwa University
Taiwan

Contemporary threat to European linguistic diversity – rethinking the current linguistic communities in Taiwan

Language plays an important role in the process of globalization. Taking European Union as an example, though EU is very proud of their linguistic diversity, they are also facing the language problems caused by the multilingual environment. In 1999, European Cultural Foundation announced the current language problems in EU, including how to maintain the linguistic and cultural diversity, how to solve the problems in translation, how to conduct bilingual or multilingual education and how to respect the independence of minority languages in EU. After May 2004, there are ten more countries which joined EU. The enlargement of EU though achieves more political and economic power; however the existed language problems become more complicated. This paper is going to focus on the threat to European linguistic diversity before and after May 2004, mainly concerning the minority linguistic rights. The thinking brought by this paper is believed to be able to serve as a reference for the subjects about the minority linguistic rights in Taiwan. Taiwan is also proud of its linguistic and cultural diversity. Following the tendency of globalization, Taiwan also faces the similar language problems as EU does. I humbly hope the comparative thinking in this paper might bring some useful insight to the problems about the minority linguistic rights.

References:

• European Cultural Foundation. 1999. “Which languages for Europe?” Report of the conference held at Oegstgeest, the Netherlands, 8-11 October 1998. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation.
• Joseph, John E. 2004. “Language and Identity – National, Ethnic, Religious”. Palgrave
• Nekvapil, Jiri. 2000. “The formation of interpretive sociolinguistics. A synopsis” in Sociolinguistics - International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics.14/2000 - The Future of European Sociolinguistics. Ulrich Ammon, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter H. Nelde, eds. pp. 33-36. Max Niemeyer Verlag Tubingen.
• Phillipson, Robert. 1992. “Linguistic Imperialism”. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
• Phillipson, Robert. 2000. “European language policy: an unmet sociolinguistic challenge” in Sociolinguistics - International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics.14/2000 - The Future of European Sociolinguistics. Ulrich Ammon, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter H. Nelde, eds. pp. 197-204. Max Niemeyer Verlag Tubingen.
• Phillipson, Robert (ed.) 2000. “Rights to language: equity, power and education”. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Sigler, Jay A. 1983. “Minority Rights: A Comparative Analysis.” Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
  
  Godfrey A. STEELE
  Department of Liberal Arts
  The University of the West Indies
  Trinidad and Tobago
  
  Course content for the language of the law and interpretation of the law
  
  The intersection of language and communication issues in the law has received attention in the academic literature, but decisions about the relevant curricular content are not always easy to make. Commenting on language and communication issues in the legal system, Gibbons concludes, “It is, therefore, not only the law that permeates our lives, but the language of the law, and it does so in ways that are not always problem free” (2003, p. 3). He adds (p. 9), “Legal communication includes nonverbal semiotic systems (i.e. gestures, illustrations), and a linguistic aspect.”
  
  This paper reviews the suggested curricular content for an introductory course in language and the law for undergraduate students in the humanities, social sciences and law pursuing a course in legal communication as part of a communication degree or part of a programme of study in a related discipline; the course may also be suitable for graduate students pursuing courses in forensic linguistics, law, legal communication without a previous background in linguistics. Part 1 focuses on the language of the law and Part 2 focuses on the interpretation of the law. The sources for the suggested course content are derived from an analysis of ten volumes of publications in the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law and related textbooks on the subject of the language and the law. Students who have a background in linguistics may find this course an interesting complement to studies in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, and any of the subfields of linguistics. A background in linguistics is not a requirement, however.
  
  Alissa TOLSTOKOROVA
  University of Economy and Law
  Ukraine
  
  Linguistic Human Rights in Gender Perspective
  
  Current debates on the possible linguistic consequences of globalization determine the content of the discourse on linguistic human rights (LHR) - a notion introduced in the end of the 20th century as a synonym to the notion “language rights”, highlighting the rights of speakers to resist global pressures and to use, maintain and develop their local languages (Dor 2003). One of the problems within the discourse on LHR is that the terms ”linguistic rights” and “language rights” are used interchangeably, both being connected with ethnic and national identities of language speakers rather than their social characteristics. I would argue that the synonymic use of these notions is an unjustified restriction of the concept of LHR, which results in the narrowing of its sphere of application and functioning. The semantic implications of the term “language right” suggest its interpretation as a “right to a language” i.e. “rights to have, use and develop one’s language”, which is primarily associated with linguistic minorities, whose access to their native languages is often denied in the context of globalization, and therefore, whose right to their language – their language right, is endangered. At the same time connotations brought about by the semantics of the term “linguistic right” par excellence, allow for a much broader interpretation of the signified notion. First of all its referent suggests a significantly wider audience as there are no reasons why human rights to a language should be a monopoly of linguistic minorities, and not belong to every language user. Logically, linguistic rights should encompass not only ethnicity, nationality or geographical identity of speakers, but all their linguistically relevant characteristics: race, gender, age, social status, profession etc. Therefore they should refer to all those who are deprived of the possibility to enjoy in full the linguistic resources of their culture, i.e. to all the linguistically endangered individuals and groups whose identity is defined not solely by ethnically-national parameters, but by a whole range of social factors. Moreover, it’s not only linguistic minorities that are challenged in exercising their right to language use - this is in many respects a problem of numerous groups of linguistic individuals who may be formally treated as linguistic majorities. One of such groups are women, whose possibilities for linguistic self-expression are questioned by the feminist or critical, linguistic tradition, and viewed as threatened and restricted in the patriarchic civilization. This situation of linguistic deprivation is termed linguistic sexism, or linguistic inequality of women and men, and regarded as a kind of linguistic gender discrimination (Hellinger, Bussmann 1999). I see a logical connection between the issues of sexism in language and linguistic human rights because to my mind, aknowledgement of linguistic gender discrimination per se requires indetification of civil rights and freedoms which are being violated through this type of discrimination. Untill recently the answer to this issue was problematic as there was no corresponding human right which could be claimed as violated. It became possible only in 1996, after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. Provided the notion of linguistic rights in the Declaration is treated in the wider sense as offered above, it allows for an opportunity to address the issue of language sexism not only in terms of gender linguistic discrimination, but in terms of violation of linguistic human rights through gender parameter. Given that women and men are treated as equal subjects of the law, they must be able to claim equal rights for their representation in language as in any other sphere of life. Therefore the speakers’ right for language expression of their gender qualities must be acknowledged as one of the major aspects of linguistic human rights.
  
  Fleur van der Houwen
  Linguistics Department
  University of Southern California
  USA
  
  Discourse orientation and the transformation of accounts
  
  According to a survey by The National Center for State Courts (1999), 40.5% of respondents indicated that they rely ‘sometimes’ or ‘regularly’ on televised small claims courts for information about the U.S. legal system. These percentages show that such productions serve not only to entertain, but also provide an important role shaping lay views of institutionalized dispute resolution. This paper is part of a larger study looking at transformation of stories on the televised small claims court Judge Judy from textual, social and cognitive perspective. In this presentation I focus on social perspective of discourse orientations and examine the interaction between the litigants and the judge from a discourse-analytic perspective. As has been noted in the literature, judges and litigants tend to draw upon different discourses (Conley and O’Barr 1990; Merry 1990). Litigants who come to small claims courts are mostly lay people unfamiliar with the discourse of the law and frame their dispute drawing upon everyday conversational devices which may result in a story unconvincing to a judge who, as a representative of the law, frames disputes to fit legal categories. This study comes to the following findings: 1) the rule-oriented and relation-oriented discourses (Conley and O’Barr 1985, 1990, 1998) are reflected and indeed magnified in the interactions in this televised small claims court genre, 2) the incompatibility of the assumptions regarding what the court can do which underlie the two discourses drawn upon to frame accounts may even lead litigants to incriminate themselves, and 3) stories constructed by litigants with relational discourse orientations are more vulnerable than those constructed from a rule-oriented perspective to being transformed and recast.
• Conley, J.M. and O’Barr, W.M. Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• Conley, J.M. and O’Barr, W.M. Just Words. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Merry, S. Getting justice and getting even: Legal consciousness among working-class Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• National Center for State Courts. How the public views the state courts. A 1999 national survey. 1999.
• O’Barr, William M. and John M. Conley. “Litigant Satisfaction Versus Legal Adequacy in Small Claims Court Narratives.” Law and Society Review 19. 4 1985: 661-701.

The cases that are heard on Judge Judy are either drawn from the archives of regular small claims courts or directly filed with the show.

Qingmei WANG
China

A Contrastive Study of Legislative English Between China and English Countries

Embarrassed by the complexity of legislative English, some claims for plain English in legislative English under the influence of the Plain English Movement. In comparison with the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution Act in Canada, we will find the Chinese Legislative English is different from that of the western countries. This paper is a contrastive study of legislative English between China and English-speaking countries to demonstrate if the legislative English in China should follow the Plain English Movement or not. The analysis is carried out at the lexical level, where legislative English in China is: (1) lengthier in average word length; (2) smaller in the quantity of archaic words (3) has no loan words; (4) and fewer pronouns. The differences in legal genealogy, social values, historical development and other objective social conditions result in differences in the feasibilities of the Plain English Movement in China and English-speaking countries.

This paper finishes with the conclusion that legislative English in China should maintain its formality and develop with Chinese characteristics while approaching internationalization, instead of following the Plain English Movement blindly.

Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
Department of English
University of Lodz
Poland

Homogeneity and modulation in English legal discourse.

The paper addresses issues of intertextual consistency of English legal discourse as reflected in official documents. It presents characteristics of legal language and refers to numerous vehicles for deonticity and the problem of precision. It sketches the status and assessment of legal English in the United Kingdom, European Union and America with implications for its future development and also includes comments on the changes invited into the legal discourse as well as the motivation against their introduction.

The main theoretical linguistic point of the article is that the semantics of legal texts is only available via pragmatic approaches, which put emphasis on contextual data. This point is illustrated with corpus data concerning the use of the deontic shall with comments on its kinship relationship with the notion of futurity within the English language. It is further argued that from a theoretical linguistic point of view the distinction is only accessible adopting a pragmatic approach.

References:

• Asprey, Michele M. (2003) Plain Language for Lawyers (3rd ed.) Sydney: The Federation Press.
• Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
• Blakemore, D. (1989). “Linguistic form and pragmatic interpretation: the explicit and the implicit.” In: The Pragmatics of Style ed. by Leo Hickey. London: Routledge: 28–51.
• Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Crystal D. & D. Davy (1969). Investigating English Style. London: Longman. Danet, B. (1980). “Language in the Legal Process”. Law & Society Review 14 (3): 445–564.
• Endicott, T. A. O. (2000). Vagueness in Law. Oxford: OUP Gibbons, J. (2003). Forensic Linguistics. An Introduction to Language in the Justice System. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Hickey, L. (ed.) (1998). Pragmatics of Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
• Klinge, A. (1992) Legal Discourse and Modality. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School.Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: CUP.
• Palmer, Frank R. (1986, 2001) Mood and Modality. Cambridge: CUP.
• Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1986, 1995: 2nd ed.). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Sweetser, Eve (1990) From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge and New York: CUP.
  
  Jaroslaw WYREMBAK
  Department of Law and Administration
  University of Warsaw
  Poland
  
  The scope of limiting the interpreter of a legal text by the word layer of the regulations of criminal law (according to the position of the Polish Supreme Court)
  
  The analysis of statements presented within the contemporary theory and philosophy of law may make us wonder that both seem to ascribe a different significance to the word layer of regulations in force. On the one hand an inclination to its vivid absolutisation can be observed. It is expressed in the theory assuming that the contents of a legal norm are determined solely and exclusively by the elements of the text expressed by regulations in force. That position allows for the possibility of appealing to extra-text reasons, or extra-linguistic reasons only in case of doubts within interpretation implied by the linguistic structure of the text of regulations applied. Nevertheless, various opinions are expressed as to the scale and the type of interpretation doubts allow for appealing to reasons that are not authorized by the wording of a normative act and what kinds of reasons not expressed in the wording of the regulations in force may provide extra interpretation of the wording of the legal norm reconstructed on their basis. The other position- following the fascination with the idea of ius et lex, seeking the ‘right’ law being ‘morally’, ´ethically’ and ‘justly’ legitimate etc. repudiates rigour stemming from the inclination to absolutisation of the value of a legal text as the only basis for the reconstruction of a legal norm. It opens to other values – also then when the linguistic structure of a legal text remains unequivocal. It assumes that the shape of a legal norm may be determined - or else enriched – with the elements of extralinguistic structure of a legal text.
  
  The exceptional fondness for the text determiners in the shape of legal norms is manifested – at least officially – on the ground of some disciplines of law. They include, in particular, criminal law. It is on the ground of this discipline that the guaranty function of the law is particularly emphasized. Its enforcement seems especially difficult in case of disturbances of the process of proper communication taking place between the employer acting as the sender of specific messages and the addresses of legal norms acting as receivers of said messages. Hence it is difficult to accept that the practice of applying to extra-text reasons within the reconstruction of legal norms could be free from the hazard of causing said disturbances.
  
  Hence does the wording layer of the regulations of criminal law have an absolute value, binding the interpreter of a legal text completely? The answer to the question asked needs to be sought considering the position of Polish Supreme Court in the subject matter. This lecture is subordinated to the analysis of this position. The considerations shall cover the statements by Supreme Court referring to the significance of the linguistic layer of the regulations of substantive criminal law – except for those which were made within endeavours to interpret regulations expressing directly the statutory hallmarks of crime.
  
  Diana Yankova
  Applied Linguistics Department
  New Bulgarian University
  Bulgaria
  
  How harmonious is harmonization of legislation
  
  The presentation will consider some terminological aspects in the process of harmonization of legislation reflecting on different approaches to the study of terms and especially to synonymy and term equivalence. The various mechanisms available to the translator will be examined within the EU context and against the background of Bulgaria’s legal culture. The analysis is based on translations of EU legislation from English into Bulgarian and highlights some felicitous choices and techniques employed, as well as some recurring inconsistencies in the long and arduous process of approximation of legislation.