Volume 33 (2018): Issue 1 (March 2018)

Based on the Guideline for MTI Training Program established by China National Committee for MTI (Master of Translation and Interpreting) Education, this research makes a successive survey on the status quo of master education of legal translators and interpreters from 2014-2016 to trace the changes and problems revealed in the five major universities of political science and law in China. By comparing and analyzing the information and facts collected on the training target, curriculum setting, teaching staff, platform construction, practical training as well as the employment in those five universities, the authors sort out the diversified advantages and features of the five law schools, and probe into the existing problems and difficulties in common. On the grounds of the survey and interview conducted by the authors in the recent years, the authors put forward the solutions and suggestions on the improvement and future development of Chinese MTI education.

Legal language is hallmarked by a pedantic and user-unfriendly jargon whose constructs are all but intuitive, not to mention the legal system specificity which makes it unique in every country. Second language (L2) learners or scholars, hence, may find it difficult to understand the language of the law; whereas translators may consider legal lexical phrases and patterns rather intricate to deal with. The literature claims that a practical way to deepen language knowledge can be found in the Web considered as corpus and in online corpora. This paper is aimed at exploring whether commercial search engines, Web concordancers and online specialised corpora can tackle the issues revolving around legal language. In particular, it will investigate whether Google advanced search and the Leeds Web concordancer can be used to meet the requirements of legal language learners, scholars and translators. Furthermore, it will address legal language queries (and results) in an online specialised corpus: the COCA. This paper will provide instances of the soundness of the above-mentioned online resources, especially when used jointly as cross-analysis tools. The shortcomings of one can, in fact, be compensated for by the other(s).

The paper reports on a survey into the linguistic needs of law professionals in four European countries, with the aim of identifying their views on the importance and their use of foreign language skills as well as their preferences for ELP course content. The data, obtained from a questionnaire survey of 536 legal professionals from Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Germany, show that while the respondents agree on many of the major points, there are also some differences conditioned by the respondents’ age and the specific tasks they perform in the legal profession. The article argues that these variables have to be taken into consideration in the LSP context because they determine some of the specific needs that need to be addressed in Legal English instruction. It is suggested that the findings about the lawyers’ self-perceived importance and preferred styles of learning are highly relevant for LSP practitioners, particularly when designing Legal English programmes and testing materials.

The author presents data gathered in an online survey questionnaire (https://www.interankiety.pl/i/RGmj5rDv) which is a part of a broader research project related to the quality of translation of English language documents in the field of commercial law that are processed in the judicial registration proceedings in reference to the entities subject to registration at the Register of Entrepreneurs of the National Court Register (RP, KRS). The questions and hypotheses posed by the author relate to the relationship or comparison of nation-wide data concerning cases with foreign element in the context of the documents in translation on file in the National Court Register (source texts and their certified translations).

The survey is the first stage of this project and has been ascribed a number of aims: allowing for a definition of the genre profile of the corpus texts; identifying the general sociologically conditioned tendencies in their structure; and – primarily – determining the practically feasible search criterion for compiling a design corpus for further quantitative and qualitative analysis of selected language structures (the ensuing stages of the said project).

The purpose of this research is to explore plain-language postulates reflecting on legal drafting assumptions since legal acts should be precise, clear and express with no doubts the intention of the legislator. The aim of this project is to commence discussion about improving the clarity of Polish consumer law based on selected plain-language techniques. This article agrees that the aspiration to make the law comprehensible for all subjects is an idealistic postulate. Ultimately, despite this, legislators’ obligation is to make an effort to increase the intelligibility of legislation wherever it is possible.