Volumen 39 (2019): Edición 1 (September 2019)

This paper examines the notion of ‘moonlighting’, which in industrial relations discourse refers to secondary employment performed in addition to the employee’s main job. As this concept might lend itself to different interpretations in English, the aim of this paper is to consider whether the ambiguous nature of this wording in source texts is also reflected in target texts, exploring how translators deal with it when rendering this concept in other languages. To this end, documents published by international institutions in English and their translations in French, Italian and Spanish were compared and contrasted, investigating the strategies put in place by translators to convey the meaning of “moonlighting” in other languages.

This article will explore how consulting the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini and Martelli 2007) can be helpful and advantageous when tackling legal translations. To this aim, a 4-hour trial lesson with experienced translators was organized. Before the workshop, the participants translated a 300-word legal document issued within a civil case. Their translations (from English to Italian) were revised during the trial lesson, where the attendants learned how to consult the BoLC. They also used supplementary online resources, such as dictionaries and/or experts’ blogs or fora. The article findings will remark that despite some drawbacks, such as the absence of POS tagging and lemmatization, and a quite complex search syntax, the BoLC helps dispel doubts and deliver outstanding translation work. Its main usefulness lies in the possibility of finding formulaic expressions and collocational use, which can be rather intricate in legal discourse.

Taking into consideration the characteristics of the Hungarian culture, language and legal system, this paper aims to study complex interrogation strategies used by Hungarian judges. This research is based on my corpus consisting of 10 Hungarian criminal trials recorded by a voice recorder, and written notes from direct observations. The analysis has a complex nature, since it relies on the results of different scientific disciplines: (1) linguistics – the main goal is to present effective interrogation strategies (2) law – it is crucial to start the research with understanding the function of the discourse type being analysed: the question strategies are intrinsically connected to the institutional role and the legal system by nature, and (3) psychology has also a great role in the investigation of interrogation in two main aspects: the testimony is based on memories and interrogation has an interpersonal part which should not be omitted in discovering the effective question strategies. This research offers rare data related to courtroom interrogation strategies and the results may also have a significant role in legal practice.