The text offers comments on legal translation and its special nature. It is argued that legal translation is much different from other types of specialised translations. Unlike the language of engineering or medicine, legal language does not only refer to the related specialised practice, i.e. the law, but constitutes legal reality, being at the same time an instrument with which legal disputes are resolved. In the context of translation, legal language is particularly challenging as the process of finding equivalence is not restricted to interlinguistic level, but invites both intralinguistic and intersemiotic considerations. Moving not only between different natural languages, but also between different legal cultures, legal translators have to face problems that can often be naturally found in intercultural communication.
This paper discusses linguistic vagueness in the context of a semantically restricted domain of legal language. It comments on selected aspects of vagueness found in contemporary English normative legal texts and on terminological problems related to vagueness and indeterminacy both in the legal domain and language in general. The discussion is illustrated with selected corpus examples of vagueness in English legal language and attempts to show problems of the relation between vagueness and ambiguity in the context of legal institutionalised systems.The discussion also evokes theoretical issues which pertain to the relation between legal texts and their contexts, the problem of how linguistic forms acquire their contextual meaning and how linguistic expressions are disambiguated. These issues are further related to the post-Gricean theory of relevance, its inferential model of communication, and the interplay between the linguistic code and inferential processes in (specialised) communication.
This paper comments on selected problems of the definition of linguistic pragmatics with a focus on notions associated with speech act theory in the tradition of John Langshaw Austin. In more detail it concentrates on the (ir)relevance of the use of the Austinian categorisation into locution, illocution, and perlocution in locating a divide in between pragmatics and semantics, and especially the distinction between the locutionary act and the illocutionary act and its implications for the definition of pragmatics and its separation from the semantic theory.The relation between form and meaning is further briefly reviewed against dichotomies including the Gricean and neo-Gricean ‘what is said’ versus ‘what is implicated’ or meant, between what can be ‘locuted’, but not said, and what can be said, but not asserted. These dichotomies are related to the theoretical commitments as to the accepted operative forces in speech acts, primarily convention and intention. It is suggested that, roughly, the development of the speech act theory can be viewed as a process by which the theory moves away from its originally sociolinguistic orientation towards a more psychologistic account, which in turn leads towards diminishing the role of (traditional) semantics and the subsequent juxtaposition of pragmatics and syntax rather than pragmatics and semantics.
This paper comments on selected problems related to the theory and practice of translation in various professional, and other semantically-restricted domains. The text introduces a selection of papers published in Research in Language, Vol. 18, No. 3, which together with a number of papers published in RiL earlier issues collectively present various research programmes which link translation and specialised discourses. The field of specialised languages is constantly growing, including new professional varieties and new approaches. There are numerous publications and journals focusing on LSP problems, as well as conferences which offer fora for relevant discussions. Selected articles in the volume originated from conference meetings “Meaning in Translation,” held in Riga, Latvia. The present paper comments on selected approaches to semantically-restricted domains in translation and features of specialised and professional discourses.
The present text offers a few comments on the metaphorical dimension of legal language and the nature of legal language as such. The authors discuss selected metaphors in the context of the Polish legislation with the aim to show how the metaphorical dimension of language can be used and abused. It is also demonstrated that the metaphorical dimension of language can cross-cut the interface between language and law on different levels. There are metaphors in legal texts that can be deliberately used to emphasise or cover selected aspects of meaning, and others that can just happen to act irrespective of any premeditated action on the part of the legislator. Finally, in a wider perspective, it is shown that the relation between ordinary language and the language of the law, i.e. ordinary meaning and legal meaning, may itself be seen as a relation between two domains within which metaphorical mapping takes place. It is claimed that the divide between the realm of law and the “real world” goes beyond a trivial division relative to expertise in the law and expertise in legal discourse, but can be better understood as the division between the legal community and the non-legal community including the academia where linguists reside.
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