Comparative Legilinguistics
Not a member yet
428 research outputs found
Sort by
On the challenges of legal translation
Get PDFThis short commentary focuses on language and law and legal translation. It stresses the importance of language used in legal texts in the legal context and the complexities when more than one language is involved in interlingual and cross-cultural communication in law. There are age old challenges in legal translation as well as new ones in the digital age with the increasing use of machine translation systems. It is imperative today that human legal translators are familiar with machine translation tools and aware of how computer aided translation technologies process information and their strengths and weaknesses. To be able to effectively use machine translation systems should become a compulsory part of the digital literacy and skill sets of legal translators in the twenty-first century.
This short commentary focuses on language and law and legal translation. It stresses the importance of language used in legal texts in the legal context and the complexities when more than one language is involved in interlingual and cross-cultural communication in law. There are age old challenges in legal translation as well as new ones in the digital age with the increasing use of machine translation systems. It is imperative today that human legal translators are familiar with machine translation tools and aware of how computer aided translation technologies process information and their strengths and weaknesses. To be able to effectively use machine translation systems should become a compulsory part of the digital literacy and skill sets of legal translators in the twenty-first century.
Attention mechanism and skip-gram embedded phrases: short and long-distance dependency n-grams for legal corpora
Get PDFThis article examines common translation errors that occur in the translation of legal texts. In particular, it focuses on how German texts containing legal terminology are rendered into Modern Greek by the Google translation machine. Our case study is the Google-assisted translation of the original (German) version of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany into Modern Greek. A training method is proposed for phrase extraction based on the occurrence frequency, which goes through the Skip-gram algorithm to be then integrated into the Self Attention Mechanism proposed by Vaswani et al. (2017) in order to minimise human effort and contribute to the development of a robust machine translation system for multi-word legal terms and special phrases. This Neural Machine Translation approach aims at developing vectorised phrases from large corpora and process them for translation. The research direction is to increase the in-domain training data set and enrich the vector dimension with more information for legal concepts (domain specific features)
Tradurre formule giuridiche attraverso i corpora
Get PDFFixed lexical or syntactical expressions and formulae hallmark legal language. They serve both linguistic and legal purposes, and should be rendered accordingly in a target language and legal system. Most of the times, however, formulaic expressions are translated by resorting to calques, false cognates, or phrases that are uncommon in the target legal language (and legal system). This paper is aimed at exploring how and if corpus analysis can dispel doubts and help find acceptable translation candidates. As there are currently no publicly available legal corpora addressing corporate documents such as contracts and agreements, this paper wishes to bridge this gap by building and relying on an ad hoc corpus of authentic agreements written in English as a first language according to the laws of England and Wales. In this way, corpus evidence can help find equivalents and, possibly, address recurrent mistranslations from Italian into English. During the corpus analysis process, the paper shows and discusses search queries and how equivalents can be obtained. At the same time, it questions dictionary entries. The paper findings highlight that the consultation of the ad hoc corpus allows to find acceptable translations of Italian legal formulae and address recurrent mistranslations. English formulaic expressions, in fact, can be rendered satisfactorily thanks to the possibility of noticing word usages in context, keywords in contexts and collocations. Further research can encompass a wider variety of formulae and/or legal documents so that scholars and translators can be equipped with useful reference tools.Espressioni e formule lessicali o sintattiche predefinite caratterizzano il linguaggio giuridico e sono utilizzate sia per finalità linguistiche che legali, quindi devono essere necessariamente adattate alla lingua ed al sistema giuridico di arrivo. Tuttavia, molto spesso espressioni e formule sono tradotte ricorrendo a calchi, falsi affini o frasi non frequenti nella lingua giuridica (e nel sistema giuridico) di arrivo. Il presente articolo ha lo scopo di verificare se la consultazione di un corpus di contratti possa aiutare a dissipare dubbi linguistico-giuridici e a trovare traduzioni accettabili. Poiché al momento non esistono corpora giuridici pubblicamente disponibili contenenti documenti aziendali quali contratti, questo articolo si pone l\u27obiettivo di tentare di colmare questa lacuna creando e consultando un corpus ad hoc costituito da contratti autentici redatti in lingua inglese secondo la legge dell\u27Inghilterra e Galles. In questo modo, il corpus può aiutare a trovare equivalenti e, possibilmente, correggere ricorrenti traduzioni errate dall\u27italiano all\u27inglese. Durante il processo di analisi del corpus, si mostra come è possibile ottenere equivalenti. I risultati dell\u27articolo evidenziano che la consultazione del corpus consente di trovare traduzioni accettabili di formule giuridiche italiane e di correggere frequenti errori di traduzione. Le formule inglesi, infatti, possono essere rese in modo soddisfacente grazie alla possibilità di notare gli usi delle parole nel contesto, le parole chiave ricorrenti e le collocazioni. Ulteriori ricerche possono riguardare una più ampia varietà di formule e/o documenti legali in modo che studiosi e traduttori possano avvalersi di utili strumenti di riferimento
L’espressione dei concetti di dolus e culpa nel linguaggio giuridico cinese: caratteristiche distintive e criticità
Get PDFThe ‘migration’ of concepts from one language to another, which takes place in cultural exchange, frequently gives rise to changes in the target language, primarily involving the lexical field. The reception of the Romanist legal tradition in China has led to the formation of a specialized lexicon which, along with the translation and production of Roman law-related works, has been subject to constant growth. This kind of terminological transposition has often resulted in the emergence in Chinese of more than one translatant for the same Latin word. As a concrete example of this phenomenon, this paper aims at providing a synoptical overview of the rendering in Chinese of the concepts of dolus and culpa, two legal institutions also largely connected to the field of commercial law. The sources analyzed from a diachronic and contrastive perspective range from the earliest manuals of Roman law published in China at the beginning of the twentieth century to recent documents, translated or directly composed in Chinese. More specifically, this paper will try to answer the following questions: what is the historical evolution of the main terms used in Chinese to express the concepts of dolus and culpa? What are the criteria adopted by Chinese translators/authors in choosing these terms? What are the main features and issues related to the linguistic rendering of the two legal institutions?As for the results of this study, attention will be paid to one of the peculiarities of the linguistic rendering of the concept of culpa, that is the use of two different translatants: guoshi 过失 and guocuo 过错. At the same time, another aspect on which this paper will shed light is the existence of a plethora of translatants related to the concept of dolus (qizha 欺诈, guyi 故意, zhaqi 诈欺, etc.). In this sense, on the one hand, it will be shown how the presence of multiple translatants is acceptable and useful when they are used to express the different shades of meaning conveyed by dolus and culpa that cannot be rendered by means of one single translatant for each of these two notions; on the other hand, this paper will highlight the necessity of a higher homogeneity and standardization of the Chinese Romanist lexicon.La trasmissione di sapere da una cultura ad un’altra viaggia attraverso il linguaggio e tale ‘migrazione’ di concetti da un idioma ad un altro è un processo sovente foriero di molteplici trasformazioni nella lingua di arrivo, le quali investono in primis la sfera lessicale. La recezione del diritto romano in Cina è pertanto coincisa con la formazione di un lessico specialistico che, di pari passo con la crescita della letteratura romanistica cinese, si è costantemente arricchito. In tale processo, la resa terminologica dei contenuti propri della tradizione giuridica romanistica si è spesso manifestata con la comparsa in cinese di più di un traducente per lo stesso termine latino. Come esempio concreto di questo fenomeno, il presente contributo mira a fornire un quadro sinottico relativo alla resa in cinese dei concetti di dolus e culpa, istituti giuridici anche ampiamente connessi con la sfera del diritto commerciale. Le fonti analizzate, in chiave diacronica e contrastiva, spaziano dai primi manuali di diritto romano pubblicati in Cina all’inizio del XX secolo a documenti recenti, tradotti o composti in cinese. Più specificatamente, questo contributo proverà a rispondere ai seguenti quesiti: qual è l’evoluzione storica dei principali termini impiegati in cinese per esprimere i concetti di dolus e culpa? Quali sono i criteri adottati da traduttori e autori cinesi nella scelta di tale terminologia? Quali le principali caratteristiche e criticità connesse con la resa di questi due istituti giuridici?
Quanto ai risultati della presente indagine, particolare attenzione sarà posta ad una delle peculiarità della resa linguistica del concetto di culpa, ovvero l’uso dei due diversi traducenti guoshi过失e guocuo过错. Al contempo, un altro aspetto che verrà messo in luce dal presente studio è l’esistenza di una pletora di traducenti per dolus (qizha 欺诈, guyi 故意, zhaqi 诈欺, ecc.). In tal senso, da un lato sarà evidenziato come la presenza di molteplici traducenti appaia in taluni casi fondata e funzionale all’espressione delle diverse sfumature di significato convogliate da dolus e culpa; dall’altro, sarà, altresì sottolineata la necessità di una maggiore uniformità del lessico romanistico cinese, nonché di una sua ulteriore standardizzazione
The new development and characteristics of Chinese forensic linguistics in the past two decades
Get PDFForensic Linguistics as a discipline has gone through more than 30 years of development in China, which can be divided into the brewing period, the establishment and development period, and the comprehensive improvement period. Scholars have presented the origin and development of forensic linguistics in the form of papers, monographs, translations, textbooks, seminars, conferences and other forms, which promotes the future development of forensic linguistics. In the past decade, the study of forensic linguistics has mainly focused on the theoretical research of forensic linguistics, the application of legislative and judicial language, the translation and teaching of legal language. This paper will adopt the method of literature research to summarize the origin and development of Chinese forensic linguistics in the past 30 years, and to anticipate the future development direction of forensic linguistics in the light of the current research characteristics and the hotspot of the times, so as to provide references for the theoretical development and application practice of current forensic linguistics, and to better guide future discipline development in China.法律语言学在中国历经了三十多年的发展，以十年多为分界线，可以分为酝酿时期、创立发展时期、全面提高时期。学者们将法律语言学的起源和发展状况以论文、专著、译著、教材、研讨会等形式呈现出来，促进了未来法律语言学的发展。近十年来，法律语言学的研究主要集中在法律语言学理论研究、立法及司法语言应用研究、法律语言翻译研究和法律语言教学研究等四个方面。文章将运用文献综述法，旨在概括、总结过去三十多年中国法律语言学的起源和发展状况，结合当下研究特色与时代热点，对法律语言学未来的发展方向做出展望，以期为当下法律语言学的理论发展与应用实践提供文献参考，以更好地指导未来的学科发展
Intralingual and intersemiotic translation for accessibility in educational and social environments - focus on legal language
Get PDFOver the years, what is normally referred to as visual law has increasingly developed and some scholars have been tentatively experimenting with legally binding comics, although in very limited numbers. This article posits itself as part of that tradition, while taking the issue a step forward, further developing the academic discussion around the notion of accessibility in legal language and emphasising the importance that different forms of translation can assume in this context. The article thus discusses the impact that intralingual and intersemiotic translation can have in both “educational” and more “social” contexts, finally providing two brief examples of how these forms of translation can render legal discourse more accessible and understandable to a great variety of receivers, regardless of their age, level of education, cultural origin, etc.Nel corso degli anni si è sviluppato sempre di più quello che normalmente viene definito diritto visivo e alcuni studiosi hanno sperimentato, seppur in numero molto limitato, il fumetto giuridicamente vincolante. Questo articolo si colloca quindi all’interno di questa tradizione, sviluppando tuttavia ulteriormente il dibattito accademico sulla nozione di accessibilità del linguaggio giuridico e sottolineando l’importanza che diverse forme di traduzione possono assumere in questo contesto. L’articolo discute quindi l’impatto che la traduzione intralinguistica e intersemiotica può avere in contesti tanto “educativi” quanto “sociali”, fornendo infine due brevi esempi di come queste forme di traduzione possano rendere il discorso giuridico più accessibile e comprensibile a una grande varietà di destinatari, indipendentemente dalla loro età, livello di istruzione, origine culturale, ecc
The translation of an Italian procura alle liti into English: word-by-word rendering or functional translation?
Get PDFAd hoc corpora are considered effective to deliver native-like technical (and legal) translation. This paper explores how the translation of a system-specific document such as an Italian procura alle liti (power of attorney to appear in court) can be addressed. Translating this legal document may be problematic due to the fact that it is not recurrent in the common law system, which contemplates other types of special powers of attorney (PoAs). This paper explores whether and to what extent a corpus-based translation is possible when L2 parallel texts are difficult to find in native contexts. To this aim, a translation project with technical translators and lawyers is carried out. The participants compose an ad hoc corpus which they consult as a language reference tool. The paper findings report that the translators\u27 corpus-based translation is mostly a word-by-word rendering of the source text, which may sound unnatural to an expert of the field. The lawyers\u27 translation partly deviates from source words, but addresses the communicative function of the source text. The paper highlights the need for a balance between the two strategies, for example by focusing on textual functionality and/or paraphrasing, although at the cost of a reduced formulaicity.I corpora specialistici sono considerati efficaci nelle traduzioni tecniche (e legali). Il presente articolo esplora come affrontare la traduzione di una procura alle liti, che è un documento giuridico altamente caratterizzante il sistema giuridico italiano. La traduzione di tale atto giuridico può risultare problematica in quanto non ricorrente nel common law, che contempla altre tipologie di procure speciali. Si esplora quindi se e fino a che punto una traduzione basata sui corpora sia fattibile quando i testi paralleli nella lingua di arrivo sono difficili da trovare in contesti nativi. A tal fine, si realizza un progetto di traduzione con traduttori tecnici ed avvocati. I partecipanti compongono un corpus ad hoc che consultano come strumento di riferimento linguistico. I risultati dell\u27articolo dimostrano che la traduzione basata sul corpus dei traduttori è principalmente una resa parola per parola del testo di partenza, la quale può sembrare innaturale ad un esperto del settore. La traduzione degli avvocati si discosta in parte dal testo di partenza, ma ne affronta in miglior modo la funzione comunicativa. Il contributo evidenzia la necessità di trovare un equilibrio tra le due strategie, ad esempio concentrandosi sulla funzionalità testuale e/o sulla parafrasi, anche se a costo di una ridotta formulaicità
The right to the environment? Article 4(1) of the Polish Environmental Protection Law Act from a combined comparative law and Polish-English legal translation perspective
Get PDFA human right to the environment is increasingly recognised in both domestic and international law. Also in Polish legal scholarship, there is a discussion over the possibility of deriving a right to the environment from the Constitution or ordinary statutes, including Article 4(1) of the Environmental Protection Law Act. The existing English translations of its opening words, and specifically the term powszechne korzystanie ze środowiska, appear to mirror the legal controversy. Compared to Poland, the major common law jurisdictions, i.e. England and the USA, show multiple differences in respect of the public’s enjoyment of the environment. In addition to a distinct legal mentalité, grounded on a case-by-case approach, negative freedoms and remedies thinking, both jurisdictions are characterised by considerable private ownership of natural resources like rivers and forests. In view of this legal and translation problem, the present paper seeks to employ comparative law methodology to establish an acceptable English translation equivalent of the term powszechne korzystanie ze środowiska. The analysis is also an attempt to go beyond the ways in which the use of comparative law in legal translation is typically perceived, i.e., beyond functionalism, beyond micorcomparison and beyond conceptual analysis.Prawo człowieka do środowiska znajduje coraz szersze uznanie w krajowych i międzynarodowych systemach prawnych. Również w polskiej nauce prawa toczy się dyskusja na temat możliwości wyprowadzenia prawa do środowiska z Konstytucji lub ustaw zwykłych, w tym z art. 4 ust. 1 Ustawy – Prawo ochrony środowiska. Istniejące angielskie przekłady początkowych słów tego przepisu, a ściślej terminu „powszechne korzystanie ze środowiska”, wydają się odzwierciedlać wspomniane kontrowersje prawne. Jeśli chodzi o kwestię korzystania ze środowiska przez obywateli, najważniejsze obszary prawne tradycji common law, czyli Anglia i Stany Zjednoczone, wykazują w porównaniu z Polską wiele różnic. Oprócz odmiennej mentalności prawnej, zorientowanej na fakty konkretnych spraw, wolności negatywne i dostępne środki ochrony prawnej, obszary te cechuje wysoki udział własności prywatnej zasobów naturalnych takich, jak rzeki i lasy. W świetle powyższego problemu prawno-tłumaczeniowego celem niniejszego artykułu jest wykorzystanie metod prawa porównawczego do ustalenia akceptowalnego angielskiego ekwiwalentu tłumaczeniowego terminu „powszechne korzystanie ze środowiska”. Przeprowadzona analiza jest również próbą wyjścia poza typowe sposoby wykorzystania prawa porównawczego w tłumaczeniu prawniczym, tj. poza metodę funkcjonalną, mikrokomparatystykę i analizę pojęciową