Lingue Culture Mediazioni - Languages Cultures Mediation (LCM Journal)
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures ... more The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures have altered everyone’s daily routine. Such measures have been put in place through legislative and regulatory acts, whose typical linguistic features make them not always accessible to the population they apply to. Therefore, other forms of communication have been used as a form of mediation, for instance by institutions and news media outlets, to share information on and thus facilitate the implementation of such measures among the population. This paper presents an exploratory micro-analysis of an English and an Italian webpage containing frequently asked questions (FAQs), a web genre often used for knowledge dissemination but still scarcely investigated from a linguistic perspective. The aim of the FAQs examined is to explain the provisions adopted to tackle the second wave of the pandemic (the two webpages were available online in September 2020) to a non-specialised and non-better ...
Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA was the first legal act adopted by the European Union to ... more Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA was the first legal act adopted by the European Union to lay down general provisions addressing victims of crime and their rights. Significant progress was achieved a decade later by adopting Directive 2012/29/EU, which established minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime. This article presents a study conducted on the terms starting with the head element “right” extracted from both acts. The aim was to determine whether the legal progress experienced in a decade was accompanied by an evolution in the terminology used. The study revealed that, when legal terminology is analysed from a diachronic perspective, different phenomena can be observed: in this case, instances of stability, formal neology, and complete neology were identified. Diachronic evolution phenomena in legal terminology are then considered from a didactic perspective: students of law, legal translation, and legal terminology are deemed likely...
First edition of the English translation of the Italian Code of criminal procedure with three Int... more First edition of the English translation of the Italian Code of criminal procedure with three Introductory essays: the first by the co-editor Luca Luparia, the second by the co-editor Mitja Gialuz, the third by the co-editor Federica Scarpa and the two translators Katia Peruzzo and Gianluca Pontrandolfo
A team of linguists and legal scholars of the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Tra... more A team of linguists and legal scholars of the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trieste is working on TERMitLEX, a new terminological knowledge base (TKB) dealing exclusively with legal matters. TERMitLEX is based on the terminological record template developed for TERMit (Magris 2001, 2002), the first terminology database of the University of Trieste. Given that (prospective) lawyers represent a new group of end users besides translators and interpreters, their specific needs were taken into account in the design of this new TKB. To identify the future lawyers\u2019 needs, a questionnaire was administered to final-year students of the Department\u2019s own 5-year degree programme in Law. The questionnaire revealed that the students have a scarce knowledge of both traditional and online lexicographical and terminological resources and therefore either do not use them efficiently or do not use them at all. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the future lawyers\u2019 needs and preferences and to illustrate what impact these needs and preferences can have on the structure of a TKB
The selection of papers dealing with different aspects related to translation and interpreting in... more The selection of papers dealing with different aspects related to translation and interpreting in the legal field which have been collected in this Special Issue provides further proof of the multifaceted nature and complexity of Legal Translation and Interpreting Studies. Most of the papers were originally presented at the International Conference Translation and Interpreting: Convergence,Contact, Interaction held at the University of Trieste (Italy) on 26\u201328 May 2016. The main idea of the Conference was to explore and create opportunities for contact and comparison between specialists in the fields of translation and interpreting in terms of research, teaching and professional practice
1. The evolution of electronic terminological resources – 1.1. The shift from TDBs to TKBs – 1.2.... more 1. The evolution of electronic terminological resources – 1.1. The shift from TDBs to TKBs – 1.2. The shift from TKBs to ontologies – 1.3. The shift from ontologies to ontological TKBs – 2. Terminological resources for legal language – 2.1. Legal terminology and the EU – 2.2. ‘Traditional’ resources for legal terminology – 2.3. The LTS: an innovative approach toward legal terminology within the EU – 3. MuLex: a legal translation-oriented TKB – 3.1. MuLex: general features – 3.2. Capturing multidimensionality in MuLex – 3.3. Conceptual relational structures – 3.4. Types of relations in conceptual relational structures – 4. Conclusions
The EU legal system and the legal systems of its Member States have to adapt to the ever-changing... more The EU legal system and the legal systems of its Member States have to adapt to the ever-changing nature of society and are therefore in a constantly evolving state. The EU, which is characterised by a unique lawmaking system, has proved to be an inexhaustible source of legislation, giving rise to a dynamic legal context. The same dynamicity can be observed also from a linguistic perspective. Due to the multilingualism principle, which makes multilingual communication a mandatory activity in EU institutions, new EU legislation and, consequently, new legal concepts are expressed in equally authentic texts. As a result, 23 different varieties of national official languages are being developed within the EU and existing terms are already undergoing a Europeanisation process. This paper presents a case study conducted on the terminology extracted from a corpus of parallel EU documents in English and Italian on the specific subdomain of the standing of victims in criminal proceedings and...
Legal multilingualism within the EU is based on the widely accepted principle of equality of auth... more Legal multilingualism within the EU is based on the widely accepted principle of equality of authentic texts, which have the same legal force and are thus expected to convey the same meaning. In this regard, it is to be acknowledged that the equally authentic texts building the acquis communautaire are not the result of multilingual legal drafting, which would involve 23 official languages, but rather the product of translation or, as some authors may prefer, \u201cinterlingual text reproduction\u201d (Kj\ue6r 2007). In order to ensure intelligible and consistent legislation, in 2003 the Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of legislation within the Community institutions was published. Considering that in its Guideline 6 the Guide recommends an inter- and intra-textually consistent usage of terminology, a contrastive analysis of a selection of English and Italian terms extracted from victim-related EU acts will be conducted. The approach of this analysis will be parole-oriented and descriptive, and consequently different from traditional prescriptive multilingual terminological work, whose purpose is to examine specialized languages in order to select the most suitable equivalents in a specific field to be collected in a repository to be used by translators and technical writers. The main aim of the analysis is to observe the terms or other linguistic strategies which are used in the Italian texts to reproduce English domain-specific terms in order to shed light on terminological variation and different forms of interlingual lexical inconsistency in Italian texts, even when the latter maintain conceptual coherence when compared to the English texts. On the basis of such an analysis, an attempt is made to evaluate quality from a terminological perspective. Since no single definition of quality \u2013 especially in language-based professions \u2013 is available, for the purposes of this study quality is intended as the adequacy of terminological solutions adopted to guarantee \u201ctotal concordance\u201d (Vlachopoulos 2008) among different linguistic versions of the same legal texts, also in the light of the Guideline\u2019s recommendation to maintain formal and substantive consistency in the usage of terminology in EU acts
The Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trie... more The Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trieste is working on TERMitLEX, a new terminological knowledge base (TKB) containing legal terminology. This knowledge base is specifically meant to meet the needs and expectations of legal experts besides those of terminologists and translators. Expert input through consultation with legal practitioners was sought to design the template for the terminological records to be included in TERMitLEX. As part of this consultation process, a questionnaire was submitted to final-year students of the Department’s own 5-year degree programme in Law. This paper first presents the questionnaire and then analyses participant responses. The results of the questionnaire not only provide information for the design of TERMitLEX (e.g. what aspects of a legal TKB students are most interested in, such as contexts, phraseology, and equivalence), but also shed light on other important factors in the learning pr...
National and international judicial systems are today in constant interaction. This interaction h... more National and international judicial systems are today in constant interaction. This interaction has been mainly studied by legal scholars, who termed it “transjudicial communication”. This communication manifests itself in case law and may also be of interest for linguists. The focus in this chapter is on one of the possible linguistic manifestations of transjudicial communication in the judgments delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). They consist in “external cross-references”, i.e. references that point to sources of legislative or judicial law other than the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) and its Protocols or the ECtHR case law. The chapter presents a feasibility study conducted on a small corpus of three English judgments delivered by the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR. The aim of the study is first to develop a language-specific methodology for the semi-automatic extraction of cross-references and then to conduct a q...
The aim of the English translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure is to make the conte... more The aim of the English translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure is to make the content of the Code available to a wide English-speaking audience, with European citizens as its main target audience. Hence the challenging choice of European English as the target language (TL) for the translation. This paper focuses on the terminological units designating legal concepts that are embedded in the Italian legal system for which either 1) no established translation equivalent was found in the reference corpus, or 2) one or more translation equivalents were found but eventually discarded for different reasons. Concrete examples of terminological choices are provided to show the methodology applied by the interdisciplinary translation team to exploit European English linguistic resources for disseminating legal knowledge that is rooted in a national legal system
Lingue Culture Mediazioni - Languages Cultures Mediation (LCM Journal)
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures ... more The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures have altered everyone’s daily routine. Such measures have been put in place through legislative and regulatory acts, whose typical linguistic features make them not always accessible to the population they apply to. Therefore, other forms of communication have been used as a form of mediation, for instance by institutions and news media outlets, to share information on and thus facilitate the implementation of such measures among the population. This paper presents an exploratory micro-analysis of an English and an Italian webpage containing frequently asked questions (FAQs), a web genre often used for knowledge dissemination but still scarcely investigated from a linguistic perspective. The aim of the FAQs examined is to explain the provisions adopted to tackle the second wave of the pandemic (the two webpages were available online in September 2020) to a non-specialised and non-better ...
Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA was the first legal act adopted by the European Union to ... more Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA was the first legal act adopted by the European Union to lay down general provisions addressing victims of crime and their rights. Significant progress was achieved a decade later by adopting Directive 2012/29/EU, which established minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime. This article presents a study conducted on the terms starting with the head element “right” extracted from both acts. The aim was to determine whether the legal progress experienced in a decade was accompanied by an evolution in the terminology used. The study revealed that, when legal terminology is analysed from a diachronic perspective, different phenomena can be observed: in this case, instances of stability, formal neology, and complete neology were identified. Diachronic evolution phenomena in legal terminology are then considered from a didactic perspective: students of law, legal translation, and legal terminology are deemed likely...
First edition of the English translation of the Italian Code of criminal procedure with three Int... more First edition of the English translation of the Italian Code of criminal procedure with three Introductory essays: the first by the co-editor Luca Luparia, the second by the co-editor Mitja Gialuz, the third by the co-editor Federica Scarpa and the two translators Katia Peruzzo and Gianluca Pontrandolfo
A team of linguists and legal scholars of the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Tra... more A team of linguists and legal scholars of the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trieste is working on TERMitLEX, a new terminological knowledge base (TKB) dealing exclusively with legal matters. TERMitLEX is based on the terminological record template developed for TERMit (Magris 2001, 2002), the first terminology database of the University of Trieste. Given that (prospective) lawyers represent a new group of end users besides translators and interpreters, their specific needs were taken into account in the design of this new TKB. To identify the future lawyers\u2019 needs, a questionnaire was administered to final-year students of the Department\u2019s own 5-year degree programme in Law. The questionnaire revealed that the students have a scarce knowledge of both traditional and online lexicographical and terminological resources and therefore either do not use them efficiently or do not use them at all. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the future lawyers\u2019 needs and preferences and to illustrate what impact these needs and preferences can have on the structure of a TKB
The selection of papers dealing with different aspects related to translation and interpreting in... more The selection of papers dealing with different aspects related to translation and interpreting in the legal field which have been collected in this Special Issue provides further proof of the multifaceted nature and complexity of Legal Translation and Interpreting Studies. Most of the papers were originally presented at the International Conference Translation and Interpreting: Convergence,Contact, Interaction held at the University of Trieste (Italy) on 26\u201328 May 2016. The main idea of the Conference was to explore and create opportunities for contact and comparison between specialists in the fields of translation and interpreting in terms of research, teaching and professional practice
1. The evolution of electronic terminological resources – 1.1. The shift from TDBs to TKBs – 1.2.... more 1. The evolution of electronic terminological resources – 1.1. The shift from TDBs to TKBs – 1.2. The shift from TKBs to ontologies – 1.3. The shift from ontologies to ontological TKBs – 2. Terminological resources for legal language – 2.1. Legal terminology and the EU – 2.2. ‘Traditional’ resources for legal terminology – 2.3. The LTS: an innovative approach toward legal terminology within the EU – 3. MuLex: a legal translation-oriented TKB – 3.1. MuLex: general features – 3.2. Capturing multidimensionality in MuLex – 3.3. Conceptual relational structures – 3.4. Types of relations in conceptual relational structures – 4. Conclusions
The EU legal system and the legal systems of its Member States have to adapt to the ever-changing... more The EU legal system and the legal systems of its Member States have to adapt to the ever-changing nature of society and are therefore in a constantly evolving state. The EU, which is characterised by a unique lawmaking system, has proved to be an inexhaustible source of legislation, giving rise to a dynamic legal context. The same dynamicity can be observed also from a linguistic perspective. Due to the multilingualism principle, which makes multilingual communication a mandatory activity in EU institutions, new EU legislation and, consequently, new legal concepts are expressed in equally authentic texts. As a result, 23 different varieties of national official languages are being developed within the EU and existing terms are already undergoing a Europeanisation process. This paper presents a case study conducted on the terminology extracted from a corpus of parallel EU documents in English and Italian on the specific subdomain of the standing of victims in criminal proceedings and...
Legal multilingualism within the EU is based on the widely accepted principle of equality of auth... more Legal multilingualism within the EU is based on the widely accepted principle of equality of authentic texts, which have the same legal force and are thus expected to convey the same meaning. In this regard, it is to be acknowledged that the equally authentic texts building the acquis communautaire are not the result of multilingual legal drafting, which would involve 23 official languages, but rather the product of translation or, as some authors may prefer, \u201cinterlingual text reproduction\u201d (Kj\ue6r 2007). In order to ensure intelligible and consistent legislation, in 2003 the Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of legislation within the Community institutions was published. Considering that in its Guideline 6 the Guide recommends an inter- and intra-textually consistent usage of terminology, a contrastive analysis of a selection of English and Italian terms extracted from victim-related EU acts will be conducted. The approach of this analysis will be parole-oriented and descriptive, and consequently different from traditional prescriptive multilingual terminological work, whose purpose is to examine specialized languages in order to select the most suitable equivalents in a specific field to be collected in a repository to be used by translators and technical writers. The main aim of the analysis is to observe the terms or other linguistic strategies which are used in the Italian texts to reproduce English domain-specific terms in order to shed light on terminological variation and different forms of interlingual lexical inconsistency in Italian texts, even when the latter maintain conceptual coherence when compared to the English texts. On the basis of such an analysis, an attempt is made to evaluate quality from a terminological perspective. Since no single definition of quality \u2013 especially in language-based professions \u2013 is available, for the purposes of this study quality is intended as the adequacy of terminological solutions adopted to guarantee \u201ctotal concordance\u201d (Vlachopoulos 2008) among different linguistic versions of the same legal texts, also in the light of the Guideline\u2019s recommendation to maintain formal and substantive consistency in the usage of terminology in EU acts
The Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trie... more The Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trieste is working on TERMitLEX, a new terminological knowledge base (TKB) containing legal terminology. This knowledge base is specifically meant to meet the needs and expectations of legal experts besides those of terminologists and translators. Expert input through consultation with legal practitioners was sought to design the template for the terminological records to be included in TERMitLEX. As part of this consultation process, a questionnaire was submitted to final-year students of the Department’s own 5-year degree programme in Law. This paper first presents the questionnaire and then analyses participant responses. The results of the questionnaire not only provide information for the design of TERMitLEX (e.g. what aspects of a legal TKB students are most interested in, such as contexts, phraseology, and equivalence), but also shed light on other important factors in the learning pr...
National and international judicial systems are today in constant interaction. This interaction h... more National and international judicial systems are today in constant interaction. This interaction has been mainly studied by legal scholars, who termed it “transjudicial communication”. This communication manifests itself in case law and may also be of interest for linguists. The focus in this chapter is on one of the possible linguistic manifestations of transjudicial communication in the judgments delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). They consist in “external cross-references”, i.e. references that point to sources of legislative or judicial law other than the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) and its Protocols or the ECtHR case law. The chapter presents a feasibility study conducted on a small corpus of three English judgments delivered by the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR. The aim of the study is first to develop a language-specific methodology for the semi-automatic extraction of cross-references and then to conduct a q...
The aim of the English translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure is to make the conte... more The aim of the English translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure is to make the content of the Code available to a wide English-speaking audience, with European citizens as its main target audience. Hence the challenging choice of European English as the target language (TL) for the translation. This paper focuses on the terminological units designating legal concepts that are embedded in the Italian legal system for which either 1) no established translation equivalent was found in the reference corpus, or 2) one or more translation equivalents were found but eventually discarded for different reasons. Concrete examples of terminological choices are provided to show the methodology applied by the interdisciplinary translation team to exploit European English linguistic resources for disseminating legal knowledge that is rooted in a national legal system
“Legal English in the classroom: the IUSLIT experience”, 13th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE 2016) (Galway, 22-26 August 2016).
“Translation as mediated language: a case study on simplification in the English version of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure”, ALAPP 2015 (Milano, 5-7 novembre 2015).
The focus of the corpus-based and corpus-driven study presented in this book is on a supranationa... more The focus of the corpus-based and corpus-driven study presented in this book is on a supranational institution that has received relatively little attention in linguistic research: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). After briefly illustrating the functioning of the ECtHR and its historical development, the first part of the book delves into the Court’s language regime, which consists in the use of only two official languages, i.e. English and French. The linguistic study presented in the second part of the book concerns the presence of Italian national “system-bound elements” (SBEs) in ECtHR case-law. SBEs are elements originally embedded in a legal and judicial system that are recontextualised in a different legal environment. To extract Italian SBEs from a corpus of sixteen ECtHR judgments published in English, an innovative methodology was proposed combining event templates with keywords. This allowed the retrieval of 401 expressions referring to different Italian SBEs, which were analysed in terms of their frequency, distribution, and linguistic form. The study reveals that a variety of national and international sources co-exist in the corpus and that translation plays a fundamental role in the drafting of supranational case-law, which requires the creation of “stipulative corresponding expressions”.
Uploads