Observing Eurolects

Focusing on the multi-faceted topic of Eurolects, this volume brings together knowledge and methodologies from various disciplines, including sociolinguistics, legal linguistics, corpus linguistics, and translation studies. The legislative varieties of eleven EU official and working languages (Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Maltese, Polish, Spanish) are analyzed using corpus methodologies in order to investigate the variational dynamics and translation-induced patterns of the different languages. The underlying assumption is that, within the sociolinguistic continua of the EU languages, it is possible to single out specific legislative varieties (Eurolects) that originate at a supra-national level. This research hypothesis is strongly supported by the empirical findings derived from detailed corpus analyses of each language. This work represents the first systematic and comprehensive linguistic research conducted on a wide range of EU languages using the same protocol and applying corpus methodologies to the extensive Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus.

The discipline of translation studies has gained increasing importance at the beginning of the 21st century as a result of rapid globalization and the development of computer-based translation methods. Today, changing political, economic, health, and environmental realities across the world are generating previously unknown inter-language communication challenges that can only be understood through a socially-oriented and data-driven approach. The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices draws on a wide array of case studies from all over the world to demonstrate the value of different forms of translation - written, oral, audiovisual - as social practices that are essential to achieve sustainability, accessibility, inclusion, multiculturalism, and multilingualism. Edited by Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa, this timely collection illustrates the manifold interactions between translation studies and the social and natural sciences, enabling for the first time the exchange of research resources and methods between translation and other domains' experts. Twenty-nine chapters by international scholars and professional translators apply translation studies methods to a wide range of fields, including healthcare, environmental policy, geological and cultural heritage conservation, education, tourism, comparative politics, conflict mediation, international law, commercial law, immigration, and indigenous rights. The articles engage with numerous languages, from European and Latin American contexts to Asian and Australian languages, giving unprecedented weight to the translation of indigenous languages. The Handbook highlights how translation studies generate innovative solutions to long-standing and emerging social issues, thus reformulating the scope of this discipline as a socially-oriented, empirical, and ethical research field in the 21st century.

Romance is a fertile ground for linguistic research. Instead of limiting their studies to one specialised area, some Romance scholars have managed to combine different aspects of the broad field of Romance linguistics in an impressive way. This volume is dedicated to the multifaceted research interests of Guido Mensching: Part 1 focusses on different aspects of the architecture of grammar and linguistic theory, covering Italian, Portuguese, French, Sardinian and Romance. The focus of Part 2 is on historical linguistics, discussing Old Occitan lexicography and Romance in Hebrew scripts. Part 3 is dedicated to aspects relating to plurilingualism, language contact and sociolinguistics. Part 4 explores research arguments that go beyond Romance philology but are nonetheless intertwined with it.

This innovative collection explores the points of contact between translation practice and ecological culture by focusing on the relationship between ecology and translation. The volume’s point of departure is the idea that translations, like all human activities, have a relational basis. Since they depend on places and communities to which they are addressed as well as on the cultural environment which made them possible, they should be understood as situated cultural practices, governed by a particular political ecology. Through the analysis of phenomena that relate translation and ecological culture (such as the development of ecofeminism; the translation of texts on nature; translation in postcolonial contexts; the role of dialect and minority languages in literary translation and institutional language policies and the translation of texts on migration) the book offers interpretive models that contribute to the development of eco-translation. Th volume showcases a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to an emerging disciplinary field which has gained prominence at the start of the 21st century, and places special emphasis on the perspective of gender and linguistic diversity across a wide range of languages. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies, linguistics, communication, cultural studies, and environmental humanities.

This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. Focusing on four central themes - constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities, judicial argumentation and evaluative language, judicial interpretation, and clarity in judicial discourse - the book’s ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current critical issues of the role of language in judicial settings. Contributors include legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal translators and anthropologists, who explore patterns of linguistic organisation and use in judicial institutions and analyse language as an instrument for understanding both the judicial decision-making process and its outcome. The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in legal linguistics and those specialising in judicial argumentation and reasoning ,and forensic linguists interested in the use of language in judicial settings.

This volume is a study into the norms that come into play in the translation of European Union legislation. With a focus on expressions of modality, the study adopts a corpus-based Descriptive Translation Studies approach to analyse the translation strategies used in a bilingual English/Italian parallel corpus of European Union legislation and identify the most frequent translational patterns. The book outlines the principles at the basis of the multilingual policy at the European Union and provides a detailed outline of the context in which the drafting and translation processes take place as a key to understanding the translational choices. The impact of sometimes contrasting factors such as the conventions of legal drafting at the European Union and those within the target culture, the principle of equal authenticity and the attention to the quality and readability of legislative texts is revealed in the analysis. Evidence in support of the theories concerning translation universals is also found and their implications for EU legal translation are discussed. The results lead to the formulation of several hypotheses as regards the norms governing the translation of EU legislative texts. The book also reflects on the impact that the translational choices have on the development of European Union legal language as an independent variety. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Legal Translation Studies and Linguistics, as well as practising translators.

This collection brings together new insights around current translation and interpreting practices in national and supranational settings. The book illustrates the importance of further reflection on issues around quality and assessment, given the increased development of resources for translators and interpreters. The first part of the volume focuses on these issues as embodied in case studies from a range of national and regional contexts, including Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the United States. The second part takes a broader perspective to look at best practices and questions of quality through the lens of international bodies and organizations and the shifting roles of translation and interpreting practitioners in working to manage these issues. Taken together, this collection demonstrates the relevance of critically examining processes, competences and products in current institutional translation and interpreting settings at the national and supranational levels, paving the way for further research and quality assurance strategies in the field. The Introduction, Chapter 7, and Conclusion of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

In this volume, scholars explore and discuss current issues in Theoretical Legal Linguistics (TLL) and Applied Legal Linguistics (ALL), contributing to the growing body of international research in the field. Focus is placed on the interconnected skills, tasks and approaches to the study of legal language in its plethora of facets as presented at the first international conference and the second International Legal Linguistics Workshop (ILLWS19) of the Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics. The articles present research in the areas of contract interpretation, bijuralism, the European Reference Language System, clear language and communication in legal settings, issues in legal semantics, plain legal language in multilingual legislative drafting, legal language teaching, light verb constructions in legal German, forensic linguistic expert testimony, deontic modality in legislative drafting, migration and legal language, appeals in Russian and their qualification as language crimes, and graduation in the use of force statutes. The concepts, methods, and findings offer valuable insights into current research in legal linguistics.