Volume 2, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Translation and interpretation of legal texts across languages and cultures

The present paper discusses the evolution of legal discourse as it is happening in a number of well-publicized American cases. Discussions of the First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution in relation to freedom of the press and the freedom to carry and use arms are followed by a general discussion of what it means to have a legal text considered as binding across the centuries. It is shown that legal discourse is pragmatically oriented, that is to say, its application and evolution are subject to the general evolution of society and its members, the people interacting with, and interpreting that discourse; this evolution is thus a typical pragmatically relevant process. Over the course of the centuries and years, accumulative gradual developments have often ended up totally altering the interpretation of certain laws and statutes – sometimes to the advantage, sometimes to the disadvantage of underprivileged segments of society, such as the Black population and people of different sexual orientations. The paper will discuss some characteristic historic and contemporary cases of this development.

This presentation will be devoted to types of communities communicating in legal settings for various purposes. The author will focus on the communicative needs of message senders and recipients and communication strategies they may employ from the translator’s perspective. The focus of the presentation will be placed on the communication reality and the choice of the translation strategy which should be applied in the translation or interpretation process. The research hypothesis is put forward that the more homogeneous the communicative community of message senders and recipients is, the easier the translator’s choices in respect to the translation strategy are. Consequently, the more heterogenous the communicative community is, the more difficult it is to meet the expectations of all members of the community in question. The process of choosing sufficient equivalents requires determining the communicative needs of communication process participants. However, sometimes needs and expectations of communication process participants are contradictory. Additionally, not identifying communication problems properly may result in dire consequences affecting the life of persons involved in the process of communication in legal settings. The relations binding participants to communication may be very complex. The consequences of improper identification of communicative needs of message senders and recipients will be illustrated with real-life examples of such distortions in legal communication.

In this paper it is shown how certain defeasible argumentation schemes can be used to represent the logical structure of the most common types of argument used for statutory interpretation both in civil and common law. The method is based on an argumentation structure in which the conclusion, namely, the meaning attributed to a legal source, is modeled as a claim that needs that is be supported by pro and con defeasible arguments. The defeasible nature of each scheme is shown by means of critical questions, which identify the default conditions for the accepting interpretative arguments and provide a method for evaluating a given argument as weak or strong.

This article examines the complicated legal-cultural process in which Roman law became Byzantine law and Roman legal discourse altered into Byzantine legal discourse. Roman law’s transformation into Early Byzantine law is analysed from the point of view of legal language which mutated from Latin to Greek. The approach is legal cultural and legal linguistic and focuses on the overall shape and general patterns. The goal is to highlight how legal-cultural transformation was incremental, language-bound and that there was no radical or sudden culmination point. Moreover, the analysis answers generally to the question of why sixth-century Byzantine legislative Greek contained frequent Latin loans, expressions, phrases and distortions. The discussion concentrates on the Novellae as an integral part of the process of legal cultural and linguistic change from Roman to Byzantine. Instead of going into detailed linguistic analysis, this article underlines generally the contextuality of law and the importance of legal culture

Forensic linguistics includes dialect identification also named Language Analysis for the Definition of Origin (LADO). LADO is used mainly for defining asylum seekers’ mother tongue as reflecting the speaker’s origin. The focus here is on linguistic aspects of adjacent Levant Arabic dialects in Israel (I), Jordan (J) and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Arabic has many spoken dialects in addition to Modern Standard Arabic, its written variety. Differences and similarities between dialects create confusion regarding speakers’ origin. Rich Arabic dialectal literature studies the Levant dialects, but not the precise differences between adjacent dialects . We discuss examples of adjacent under-documented Arabic dialects, which cause difficulties in LADO. The paper presents the linguistic issues involved in examples of phonological, morphological and lexical elements of Arabic dialects spoken in I, J and the PA. In Arabic dialects of these areas, some “Shibboleth” features could identify a speaker’s “mother dialect”. Linguists might use such forms for identification, if speakers use them in spontaneous speech. If they do not occur in a speaker’s recording, however, the interviewer should try to elicit them in the recording session. Currently, inter-dialect language contacts are frequent and complex, and therefore more research is required to provide the missing information.

This paper discusses the problem of translating into Polish and Swedish medical terms and definitions contained in the EU directives on human cells, tissues and organs for transplant. The author briefly discusses the issue of translating medical terms and of creating concept definitions. The translated terms and definitions are then compared with their equivalents in national regulations. Transplantology is a relatively new and dynamically developing field of medicine, hence its terminology poses a challenge to translators. The results of work done by EU translators and terminologists are verified in the course of implementing the directives into the national law. The author focuses on the Swedish methods of team work within the National Tissue Project and highlights the positive effects of this work.

Legal interpretation often includes a profusion of meta-pragmatic comments about the interpretation process itself. Thus, while pragmatic theories refer to the interpretation processes as natural, mostly unconscious processes, in legal interpretation the inference processes take on a conscious form. Meta-pragmatic comments provide a glimpse into this process and surface various aspects of it that have been described theoretically. The aim of this study is to examine the possibility of applying theoretical pragmatic terms to the legal interpretation discourse.A semantic-pragmatic analysis of a few cases shows that while the linguistic component of the legal interpretation makes it easy to apply pragmatic theory, some of the procedures performed by judges are incompatible with a semantic-pragmatic interpretation and contradict its theoretical assumptions. The purposive approach to interpretation that has developed in the Israeli legal system raises some serious problems in that sense. Applying the objective purpose of a statute even when it is obvious that the legislators could not have desired that in order to change the law cannot be considered “interpretation” in the pragmatic sense, since the central element of speaker’s intentions has been given a completely different meaning, and the aim of the interpretation procedure, namely identifying the speaker’s intentions, has for the most part been lost. This paper suggests that these cases should be viewed as exceptions to pragmatic interpretation and they do not permit application of pragmatic theory to them, at least not of the types of approaches attributed to Grice’s legacy. Nevertheless, this does not mean that theoretical pragmatic tools are not applicable to judicial opinions and to other kinds of legal text.