Abstract
This article describes an action research project on multilingual management and translation of court documents developed by the GENTT research group, which postulates that the notions of ‘textual genre’, ‘genre system’ and ‘meta-genre’ can be powerful tools for accessing and ‘reusing’ the linguistic and extra-linguistic information technical writers and translators need to manage specialised communication. To validate this hypothesis the criminal court genre systems of four countries (Germany, Spain, France and the United Kingdom) have been analysed and described from a legal-conceptual, discursive-textual and terminological perspective. The results of this contrastive analysis have been used as the basis for creating translation resources (both conceptual and linguistic), which have been organised into an online platform for translators of court documents. This platform is conceived as a knowledge system which will permit the ‘reusability’ of electronic translation resources. Our approach presents an integrative methodology for research into legal translation.
Highlights
This article, which falls within the fruitful line of research devoted to the analysis of legal discourse genres (e.g., Bhatia, 1987; Bhatia & Evangelista, 2011; Chierichetti & Garofalo, 2010; Harris, 1988; Orts Llopis, 2006) and its application to legal translation (Borja Albi, 2005, 2007; Engberg & Wølch Rasmussen, 1999; Garofalo, 2009; Monzó, 2002), describes an action research project on multilingual management and translation of court documents developed by the GENTT group over the course of 2010 and 2011.1
With this project the GENTT group aims to contribute to a new line of theoretical speculation which postulates that the notions of textual genre, genre system and meta-genre can be very powerful tools to access and reuse the linguistic and extra-linguistic information technical writers and translators need to manage specialised communication
The project is based on the hypothesis that the notions of textual genre, genre system and meta genre can help legal translators to understand how communicative acts are performed by the discursive community of legal professionals, and that translators can take advantage of this understanding to deal with the systemic anisomorphism, lexical mismatch and lack of terminological equivalence that make legal translation ‘mission impossible’
Summary
This article, which falls within the fruitful line of research devoted to the analysis of legal discourse genres (e.g., Bhatia, 1987; Bhatia & Evangelista, 2011; Chierichetti & Garofalo, 2010; Harris, 1988; Orts Llopis, 2006) and its application to legal translation (Borja Albi, 2005, 2007; Engberg & Wølch Rasmussen, 1999; Garofalo, 2009; Monzó, 2002), describes an action research project on multilingual management and translation of court documents developed by the GENTT group over the course of 2010 and 2011.1. An enormous number of documents (the bundle) is generated between these two points, following a strict technical and statutory procedure The participants in this institutional interaction constitute a welldefined discursive community, which includes judges, prosecutors, counsel for the defence, court clerks, police officers, witnesses, expert witnesses, defendants (and translators), among others. Following Bhatia (1993), genres are instances of successful achievements of specific communicative purposes using conventionalized knowledge of linguistic and discourse resources Continuing in this line of work, we find applied studies devoted to language acquisition, especially LSP, and to translation practice and training.3 Bazerman (1994) proposes an instrumental approach applied to LSP; perhaps his main contribution is the concept of genre system (already postulated in Opacki, 1963/2000), regarding the existence of sets of interdependent genres. These three dimensions are extremely important for understanding and translating the complexity of genres in different languages and cultures
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