1,721,138 research outputs found
Introduction
No full textIntroduction by the two co-editors of the special issue of the journal on "English Legal Language and Translation
Sprachliche Verfahren der Popularisierung von Rechtswissen. Zur Rekontextualisierung asylrechtlicher Grundbegriffe
No full textIn this paper, focus is upon the methods and strategies applied by a German public institution when presenting aspects of the German legislation on asylum outside the context of direct statutory communication. The recontextualization purports a change in central situational factors compared to the legislative situation. With a focus upon parts of the communication where central legal concepts are explained we investigate the dissemination process for the concepts from the basic article on asylum seeking in the German constitution. By way of the analytical concepts of Reformulate (Reformulieren), Elucidate (Erläutern) and Explain (Erklären) from Functional Pragmatics we investigate the application of different methods and possible patterns in their distribution. The investigated popularization process is characterized by dominance of clarifications concerning presupposed knowledge deemed relevant, but not expressed in the text. Actual reformulations and explanations, on the other hand, are rare
The digital (r)evolution of legal discourse: New genres, media, and linguistic practices
No full textThe primary goal of this book is to reach a better understanding of how the digital revolution has affected language and discourse practices in the field of law. It also explores the complex nature of the techniques and discursive strategies which emerge in the relationship between the different stakeholders (including non-experts) thanks to technological advances. By adopting a discourse analytical perspective which combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the book explores the hybridity of new genres and communicative processes. It provides an interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns, as well as any solutions already adopted in their professional areas
Ambiguity and Vagueness in Human Rights Discourse
No full textThe modern normative discourse of human rights provides a multi-faceted global instrument for reporting the demands of justice and for pursuing the common good of the parties (individuals and states) concerned. This is evidenced in most assertions for indivisible, fundamental and universal values of rights and freedoms. Despite this, arguments arise as to the normative discursal strategies realized to express what amounts typically to semantically underdeterminate declaratory provisions encoding such rights and freedoms. These declaratory provisions seem to be the source of ambiguity and vagueness in the process of investigating and determining the degree of clarity and precision realized under broad assertions in legal/political discourse: the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (CON), and the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CHA).
With this in mind, the aim of this chapter is to analyse communicative underdeterminacy deriving from the drafting and con-tent of the Charter as compared to the Convention. In particular, I shall reflect on this in terms of the information load / spread and rhetorical strategies adopted in the texts, which may lead the latter to be considered as either determinate or indeterminate in meaning. Then I shall look at the ways in which ambiguity and vagueness should be dealt with in human rights discourse. Finally, I shall reflect upon the shall modalized provisions to further highlight the impossibility of assuming that this modal auxiliary is not a word of legal precision in the discourse under investigation
Popularization and Knowledge Mediation in the Legal Field. COLLOQUIUM AT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE. XX. European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes: Multilingualism in Specialized Communication: Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age. 8 -10 July 2015. Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna. Vienna, Austria
No full textColloquium: Popularization and Knowledge Mediation in the Legal Field
Programme
Friday, 10 July 2015
9.00 – 9.30: Silvia Cacchiani / Chiara Preite; On informative and interactive concerns in www.justice.gouv.fr and www.justice.gov.uk: making sense of rights and the law
9.30 – 10.00: Judith Turnbull: Communicating and reconceptualizing legal advice online
10.00 – 10.30: Silvia Cavallieri: Broadcasting legal discourse: the popularization of Family Law through Youtube
Coffee break
11.00 - 11.30: Andrzej Dabrowski: Reel justice in the context of teaching Legal English as a foreign language
11.30 – 12.00: Almut Meyer: Audiences of the Law
12.00 – 12.30: Alida Maria Siletti: Structure et paratexte de deux documents sur l’UE à visée vulgarisatrice : le cas des illustrations
Lunch
14.00 – 14.30: Silvia Modena: La divulgation juridique en tant que stratégie argumentative contre l'euro
14.30 – 15.00: Giuliana Diani: Transferring legal concepts to children: a cross-linguistic analysis
15.00 – 15.30: Jan Engberg / Karin Luttermann: Vermittlung rechtlichen Wissens an Kindern und Jugendlichen
Important information
Contact for this colloqium: Jan Engberg, [email protected]
Conveners: Jan Engberg, Silvia Cacchiani, Karin Luttermann, Chiara Preite
Aim and scope
The field of studying communication in law may be subsumed under the name of Legal Linguistics. Traditionally, this type of study of specialized communication has had its focus upon performative legal texts like contracts, statutes and judgments (Engberg, 2013a). Studies of legal texts have thus often been focused upon communicative acts that may be termed internal to the legal institutions (cf. Busse, 2000), i.e., such communicative acts that fulfil the core purposes of the legal institutions. In many fields of specialized communication, this is also the case, but especially in the field of science and technology beside the expert-expert communication also the communication of specialized topics between experts and non-experts has been a frequent object of study, especially under the headline of popularization (Calsamiglia & van Dijk, 2003), both in traditional genres and, more recently, in new and Web 2.0 genres and modes. This has hardly been the case in the field of Legal Linguistics. The special thing about the legal field compared to other fields of specialized communication is that even the institution-internal communication has direct impact upon the lives of citizens outside the institutions, too: Statutes and contracts establish a legal framework that the citizens have to comply with, even if they do not understand these texts fully.
Most studies of the intelligibility of legal texts have focused upon this aspect and thus on the aspect of achieving institution-internal communicative purposes. However, in a modern Western society also this type of state institutions have to think of other asymmetrical communicative purposes like informing citizens about the law and influencing their behavior (Engberg & Luttermann, 2014), but also the purpose of mitigating the skeptical attitude of citizens towards the law and the legal institutions (Preite, 2013). We expect these functions and purposes to be the central ones to be investigated in the colloquium. The conveners of this colloquium all have published studies on instructional and popularized texts used in asymmetrical communication and on different aspects of textual intelligibility in the field of law or in other fields (Cacchiani, 2013; Engberg, 2013b; Engberg & Luttermann, 2014; Luttermann, 2010; Preite, 2012; Preite, 2013). And we have investigated texts in a number of different languages and lingua-cultures. With this experience, we will be able to sketch some relevant lines of development of this new branch of study in the field of legal linguistics in our own presentations and guarantee a high degree of multilingualism in the work of the colloquium. In the colloquium, we would like to bring especially empirical studies of non-expert genres from different (European) countries together. We will be interested in studies of texts and genres from one country as well as contrastive studies, with a view to promoting interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue and to enhancing the study of the knowledge and communicative dimensions of popularization and knowledge transfer (Ciapuscio, 2003; Calsamiglia & van Dijk, 2004) intended at effective recontextualization and intra-cultural translation of ‘shared’, uncontroversial core meanings in the legal field. More specifically, we provide reflection on the representation, construction and communication of knowledge intended for specific addressees (Kastberg, 2010; Ditlevsen, 2011) in traditional and ‘new’ non-expert genres, and different language and textual levels (from complex constructs and phraseology to patterns of textual and visual organization). Working within Legal Linguistics, we shall thus bring together diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives so as to focus on issues such as participant goals, roles and relationships, authority, dialogic/monologic orientation of the text and identity construction, (inter-)subjectivity and reconceptualization. This shall enable us to concentrate on intelligibility, diverse recontextualization strategies, and mechanisms of knowledge mediation that are specifically intented to attract and inform citizens, and thus ultimately influence their behaviour.
Conveners
Jan Engberg is professor of Knowledge Communication and holds a PhD in contrastive textology and specialized communication. His research interests include especially legal communication and legal linguistics with a focus upon the construction of specialized knowledge through legal texts in mono- and multilingual settings, the communication of legal knowledge across knowledge asymmetries and the inclusion of multimodal instruments in the mediation of legal knowledge.
Silvia Cacchiani holds a PhD in English Language and Linguistics from the U of Pisa, Italy, and has been a research fellow in English Language and Translation at the U of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, since January 2005. Her research interests range from the lexical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects of intensification to lexicology, lexicography and specialized lexicography in particular. She is currently working on simplex, complex and phrasal constructs in English, Italian and French general language and LSPs and on specialized terminology in particular, with a view to investigating transparency, (conceptual) motivation and reconceptualization of legal terms mono- and bilingual lexicographic tools and in written practical instructions intended for knowledge dissemination (e.g. PILs).
Karin Luttermann is professor at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. She is a prominent scholar in the field of Legal Linguistics in a broad sense in Germany and has among many other things developed models for analyzing meanings of legal concepts as distributed among different users in a society. In this context, she has a long record of investigating intelligibility of legal texts and concepts as well as many other aspects of the communication of legal knowledge.
Chiara Preite has been associate professor of French Language and Translation at the U of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, since November 2014. She holds an MA in Legal Translation from the U of Genoa, Italy, and a PhD in French Linguistics from the U of Brescia, Italy. Her main research interests lie in the field of legal French, lexicology, lexicography and specialized lexicography. She has published widely on these topics and is the author of the recently published monograph Langage du droit et linguistique. Etude de l’organisation textuelle énonciative et argumentative des arrêts de la Cour (et du Tribunal) de la Jusice des Communautés Européenes. She is currently carrying out work on law dictionaries from the jurilinguistic perspective and on dissemination of legal knowledge
Specialized Communication in social media
No full textSocial media serve as vital tools for sharing specialized knowledge within, outside, and across professional communities, enhancing both internal and external communication among individuals, institutions, and companies. This chapter discusses how social media communities play a crucial role in the dissemination of specialized information and how these media support professional networking, knowledge sharing, and identity projection. The interactive nature of these media may facilitate dialogues within professional virtual communities on complex subjects and may also contribute to breaking barriers between experts and the general public.
Despite their potential as reservoirs of specialized content, these platforms present information whose reliability varies considerably, highlighting the importance of user engagement and critical evaluation. Indeed, while social media offer vast opportunities for the dissemination and popularization of specialized information, they also present risks related to information disorder. Thus, there emerges an important need for strategies to enhance the veracity of content shared online, ensuring social media can continue to serve as effective platforms for professional and educational exchange
Pragmatische, syntaktische und prosodische Merkmale von Animationsfilmen als Mittel zur Popularisierung juristischen Wissens für Kinder und Jugendliche
No full textThe dissemination of legal knowledge among children and adolescents represents a particular form of popularization, which requires specific strategies of recontextualization. The present paper investigates linguistic features of such form of popularizing discourse based on the analysis of an animated explainer video about new EU rules on the matter of marine protection. While exploring some aspects of multimodal communication and thematic unfolding, the analysis focuses on the oral transmission of legal contents and points out pragmatic, syntactic and prosodic features that make the communication suitable for a young target audience.Die Vermittlung juristischen Wissens an Kinder und Jugendliche stellt eine besondere Form von Popularisierung dar, die spezifische Strategien von Rekontextualisierung erfordert. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden sprachliche Mittel solcher popularisierender Verfahren am Beispiel eines Animationsfilms über neue EU-Vorschriften zum Meeresschutz untersucht. Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse stehen neben Aspekten der multimodalen Kommunikation und der thematischen Entfaltung pragmatische, syntaktische und prosodische Merkmale, durch die die dargestellten Rechtsinhalte für ein junges Zielpublikum nachvollziehbar gemacht werden
Communicating EU Consumer Rights to Citizens: A Comparison of Tools, Strategies and Messages
No full textEffective communication with citizens is of primary importance for institutions such as the European Union. Research into EU communication has found that EU informative documents also perform a promotional function which can be viewed as part of a consensus-building strategy (cf. Magistro 2007; Giordano / Piga 2018; Silletti 2018; Seracini 2020). The present study contributes to research into how EU institutions communicate with citizens by focusing specifically on the dissemination of knowledge concerning EU law in the area of consumer protection, where legislation has been popularised on the EU website in the form of different text-types and communication tools.
This research takes a comparative approach and aims to establish how these popularised texts differ from one another in terms of their communicative function. The analysis is carried out with a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis approach (Partington 2004) on three corpora containing a set of different text-types popularising EU consumer protection legislation and takes linguistic and visual elements into consideration. Results reveal that the different text-types complement one another by fulfilling different communicative functions. The study also puts forward the idea that a process of ‘redirection’ is carried out, where knowledge is not only communicated, but is also provided as a practical tool for the lay public
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