Legal Discourse Across Languages And Cultures

The chapters constituting this volume focus on legal language seen from cross-cultural perspectives, a topic which brings together two areas of research that have burgeoned in recent years, i.e. legal linguistics and intercultural studies, reflecting the rapidly changing, multifaceted world in which legal institutions and cultural/national identities interact. Within the broad thematic leitmotif of this volume, it has been possible to identify two major strands: legal discourse across languages on the one hand, and legal discourse across cultures on the other. Of course, labels of this kind are adopted partly as a matter of convenience, and it could be argued that any paper dealing with legal discourse across languages inevitably has to do with legal discourse across cultures. But a closer inspection of the papers comprising each of these two strands reveals that there is a coherent logic behind the choice of labels. All seven chapters in the first section are concerned with legal topics where more than one language is at stake, whereas all seven chapters in the second section are concerned with legal topics where cultural differences are brought to the fore.

Chapters include: 'Concepts, Contexts and Procedures in Arbitration Discourse', 'Confidentiality in Arbitrations' 'Vagueness and Indeterminacy in Law', 'Rhetorical Strategies in Arbitration Law', 'Arbitration in Sport', 'Translation in International Arbitration' and 'Translating Terminology in Arbitration Discourse'.

What exactly is legal about legal language? What happens to legal language when it is used across linguistic, national, socio-political, cultural, and legal systems? In what way is generic integrity of legal documents maintained in multilingual and multicultural legal contexts? What happens when the same rule of law is applied across legal systems? By bringing together scholars and practitioners from more than ten countries, representing various jurisdictions, languages, and socio-political backgrounds, this book addresses these key issues arising from the differences in legal or sociocultural systems. The discussions are based not only on the analysis of the legal texts alone, but also on the factors shaping such constructions and interpretations. Given the increasing international need for accurate and authoritative translation and use of legal documents, this important volume has considerable contemporary relevance in a globalized economy. It will appeal to discourse analysts, commercial consultants, legal trainers, translators, and applied researchers in professional communication, especially in the field of legal writing and languages for specific purposes.

The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language and legal culture has had to adjust to legal concepts very different from those of the English law system. Many of the papers were inspired by two major projects on legal language and inter-multiculturality: Generic Integrity in Legislative Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts based in Hong Kong and carried out by an international team and Interculturality in Domain-specific English, a national project supported by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research, involving research units from five Italian universities

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.

This volume investigates advances in the field of legal translation both from a theoretical and practical perspective, with professional and academic insights from leading experts in the field. Part I of the collection focuses on the exploration of legal translatability from a theoretical angle. Covering fundamental issues such as equivalence in legal translation, approaches to legal translation and the interaction between judicial interpretation and legal translation, the authors offer contributions from philosophical, rhetorical, terminological and lexicographical perspectives. Part II focuses on the analysis of legal translation from a practical perspective among different jurisdictions such as China, the EU and Japan, offering multiple and pluralistic viewpoints. This book presents a collection of studies in legal translation which not only provide the latest international research findings among academics and practitioners, but also furnish us with a new approach to, and new insights into, the phenomena and nature of legal translation and legal transfer. The collection provides an invaluable reference for researchers, practitioners, academics and students specialising in law and legal translation, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and semiotics.

Written by distinguished legal and linguistic scholars and practitioners from the EU institutions, the contributions in this volume provide multidisciplinary perspectives on the vital role of language and culture as key forces shaping the dynamics of EU law. The broad spectrum of topics sheds light on major Europeanization processes at work: the gradual creation of a neutralized EU legal language with uniform concepts, for example, in the DCFR and CESL, and the emergence of a European legal culture. The main focus is on EU multilingual lawmaking, with special emphasis on problems of legal translation and term formation in the multilingual and multicultural European context, including comparative law aspects and an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of translating from a lingua franca. Of equal importance are issues relating to the multilingual interpretation of EU legislation and case law by the national courts and interpretative techniques of the CJEU, as well as the viability of the autonomy of EU legal concepts and the need for the professionalization of court interpreters Union-wide in response to Directive 2010/64/EU. Offering a good mix of theory and practice, this book is intended for scholars, practitioners and students with a special interest in the legal-linguistic aspects of EU law and their impact on old and new Member States and candidate countries as well.

In legal interpretation, where does meaning come from? Law is made from language, yet law, unlike other language-related disciplines, has not so far experienced its "pragmatic turn" towards inference and the construction of meaning. This book investigates to what extent a pragmatically based view of l linguistic and legal interpretation can lead to new theoretical views for law and, in addition, to practical consequences in legal decision-making. With its traditional emphasis on the letter of the law and the immutable stability of a text as legal foundation, law has been slow to take the pragmatic perspective: namely, the language-user 's experience and activity in making meaning. More accustomed to literal than to pragmatic notions of meaning, that is, in the text rather than constructed by speakers and hearers the disciplines of law may be culturally resistant to the pragmatic turn. By bringing together the different but complementary perspectives of pragmaticians and lawyers, this book addresses the issue of to what extent legal meaning can be productively analysed as deriving from resources beyond the text, beyond the letter of the law. This collection re-visits the feasibility of the notion of literal meaning for legal interpretation and, at the same time, the feasibility of pragmatic meaning for law. Can explications of pragmatic meaning support court actions in the same way concepts of literal meaning have traditionally supported statutory interpretations and court judgements? What are the consequences of a user-based view of language for the law, in both its practices of interpretation and its definition of itself as a field? Readers will find in this collection means of approaching such questions, and promising routes for inquiry into the genre- and field-specific characteristics of inference in law. In many respects, the problem of literal vs. pragmatic meaning confined to the text vs. reaching beyond it will appear to parallel the dichotomy in law between textualism and intentionalism. There are indeed illuminating connections between the pair of linguistic terms and the more publicly controversial legal ones. But the parallel is not exact, and the linguistic dichotomy is in any case anterior to the legal one. Even as linguistic-pragmatic investigation may serve legal domains, the legal questions themselves point back to central conditions of all linguistic meaning.