Volume 49 (2017): Issue 1 (March 2017)

Modern times are an arena for two opposing trends: the liberalization of mores and laws, and the distancing of changes and adoption of a conservative position against those that occur. Polish family law clearly fails to keep pace with the changes taking place and does not perceive new phenomena. Is this an intentional act of the legislator leading to the preservation of traditional values, or the expression of disapproval and belief in the transitoriness of new phenomena? It comes together with the introduction of new terminology or new interpretations of already existing concepts. Hence the meaning of some of the current concepts in everyday language differs significantly from their meaning arising from legal instruments. The article is an attempt to deal with this problem.

Legal English, being among the most complex and multifaceted areas of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), has duly received considerable attention on the part of linguists, discourse and learner needs′ analysts, sociolinguists and ESP researchers (Cheng and Cheng, 2014; Hafner, 2013; Hartig and Lu, 2014; Huhta et al, 2013; Shuy 2001). Most research has been carried out to investigate lexical, syntactic, grammatical and other communicative competences of law students in various cycles of higher education. An area that is still highly in need of examination is the development of communicative competences of Legal English among law practitioners who might have had a course of Legal English in their law studies and face with an urge of revision or might have not been introduced to Legal English whatsoever. In light of these observations, the present study examines the needs and problems regarding the use of general and legal English faced by 34 law practitioners, namely lawyers and judges working at two law companies and a district court in Kaunas, Lithuania. The study assumes qualitative methodology including a semi-structured interview and a questionnaire. The results have revealed that communicative competence of legal practitioners gained during their formal education does not meet the demands of their legal practice. While skills of general English appear not to cause many problems, skills of legal English are not developed to an adequate level. Therefore, as the study shows, it is absolutely inevitable to develop and offer in-service education of Legal English carefully attuned to the diverse levels of competences and needs of legal practitioners.

Though not as widely studied as the Research Article (RA), the abstract has attracted increasing interest among researchers over last decades (Swales 1990, Bhatia 1993, Dos Santos 1996, Lorés-Sanz 2008, Bondi/Cavalieri 2012, Cavalieri 2014). A number of contrastive or comparative studies of abstracts in English and other languages (Martín-Martín 2005, Lorés Sanz 2006, Van Bonn & Swales 2007, Diani 2014) have already been carried out considering mainly the hard sciences and some soft sciences such as linguistics and history, however no cross-cultural analyses have been conducted so far between RA abstracts in English and RA abstracts in French published in the legal field.

This paper seeks to investigate genre variation and changes in frame sequences comparatively in English and French RA abstracts from criminology journals.

Using a genre analytical approach to qualitative and quantitative data, the paper reports on two comparable corpora, i.e. English and French, of electronically retrieved abstracts from Criminology Journals published in 2014. The two corpora are composed of three journals per language, namely Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology for the English corpus, and Champ Pénal, Criminologie, Revue Canadienne de Droit Pénal et Criminologie for the French corpus. The analysis will be carried out following two main steps, i.e. a macro-analysis and a micro-analysis. In the former step, the corpora are compared by the analysis and discussion of the basic IMRD rhetorical move structure for the RA often proposed in the literature (e.g. Nwogu 1990; Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993; Ventola 1994; Martín-Martín 2002) and the additional five moves model postulated by Dos Santos (1996) with the aim of investigating the linguistic and rhetorical variation in the abstract genre from a cross-cultural perspective. In the latter, we look at frame sequences (Bondi/Cavalieri 2012) combining forms of self-mentions and frame markers (Hyland 2005), i.e. personal patterns (e.g. we argue / nous questionnons), impersonal patterns (e.g. it is argued / il est question) and locational patterns (e.g. the paper argues / l’article questionne) (Dahl 2004). Provisional results show that the abstracts under investigation largely follow the international conventions based on the norms established by the English-speaking international academic community. However, variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realizations of framework sequences. Cross-cultural implications are discussed at the close.

Due to the development of global economy and increased geographical and occupational mobility, communication with people from multicultural backgrounds has become commonplace in many healthcare institutions. As the demographic profiles of both patients and medical personnel are increasingly varied, intercultural competence (IC) has become an integral component of English for Medical Purposes (EMP) training. However, are medical students generally familiar with the notion of intercultural competence? What intercultural aspects should they be aware of in order to practise effectively when they graduate? The aim of this article is to present medical students′ understanding of IC based on a survey conducted among undergraduate learners at the Medical University of Bialystok, Poland. The article begins with a discussion on intercultural competence in the context of health care. Following this, a discussion on why intercultural competence needs to be incorporated and used in Medical English programmes is presented.

The paper discusses the problem of translating selected Civil Procedure terminology from Greek into Polish and from Polish into Greek. The research material includes corpora of normative acts and more precisely those, which regulate Civil Procedure of Poland, Greece and the Republic of Cyprus. The research methodology is based on the concept of parameterisation, according to which the legal linguistic reality becomes axiomatic. Then the set of relevant dimensions and parameters is extracted. The set of parameters are a tool where certain information is given: yes/no/none and thus a clear result of comparison between legal system bond terminology can be drawn up. The results of this comparative analysis provide highly regulated and available translation equivalents, which are essential when legal translation is performed within the frame of legal reality. Selected examples of use of these equivalents are given when discussing the results.

Grammar teaching has never belonged to mainstream ESP teaching/ learning practices. However, this apparent lack of concern with grammar in ESP materials runs counter to both subjective and objective needs of ESP learners. The first part of the paper presents students′ views on deficiencies of coursebooks for teaching English for Medical Purposes (EMP) as well as author’s reflective thinking on the needs of medical undergraduates of vocational schools in Poland. It is suggested that some of the deficiencies of the materials might be remedied and the students′ needs better taken care of if explicit teaching of formulaic language is introduced into ESP classroom environment. It is hypothesized that explicit teaching of formulaic language may stimulate grammar development in the long term and foster communicative competence of ESP learners in the short term. Therefore, the second part of the paper proposes pedagogically relavant classification of medical formulaic sequences motivated by the lexicogrammatical features of Medical English. The third part of the paper shows in what way the proposed classification of formulaic sequences might help teachers of medical English design tasks that are conducive to the development of formulaic competence of students of English for Medical Purposes.

This paper deals with translating legal terminology concerning child maintenance from Polish to Swedish. The analysis covers selected terms regulated in the Polish civil law and their possible Swedish equivalents. The method used is based on the parameterisation of legal terms, which allows the specification of terms by selected parameters, which are understood as mutually exclusive properties. The parameterised equivalents are analysed in the context of various types of recipients. This provides the basis for the choice of appropriate translation strategies. The author also discusses pragmatic equivalents featured in Rikstermbanken, the Swedish national terminological database, and those used in practice.

During the criminal procedure, the process of verification includes the reconstruction of past events for the sake of establishing the statement of facts. When it comes to exploring the events in the past, great significance can be attributed to personal evidence. In order to prevent the influencing of the interrogated person, many provisions of guarantee had been established in the criminal procedure. In such an interrogatory situation, the most difficult practical problem is how to word the question so that the interrogation would aim at the exploration of the mind of the witness or accused, and at the helping of the recalling of the memories. During the criminal procedure however, interrogation with the assistance of an interpreter could also result in the communication of the statements of the accused or the witness about their perceptions and original knowledge with modified contents. Another significant factor at interpreter-assisted interrogations is to avoid the will of either the interrogator or the interpreter being projected on the interrogated person, as that would threaten with the witness, the accused, or the interrogated person giving a confession that is different form their original content of consciousness.

Memrise is an educational tool available both online and for mobile devices. Memrise uses flashcards and mnemonic techniques to aid in teaching foreign languages and memorizing information from other subjects, e.g. geography, law or mathematics. Memrise courses are created by its users through the process of crowdsourcing; therefore they are tailored to the individual needs of the users and may focus on the specific content of a particular coursebook or classes.

The paper will attempt to present possibilities of using memrise in teaching and learning legal English vocabulary during a tertiary course leading to TOLES (Test of Legal English Skills) certificate examination. The paper will look at various types of exercises which facilitate memorizing vocabulary, learning collocations, prepositional phrases, develop the skill of paraphrasing and defining legal terms of art in plain English. Application of the crowdsourcing method enables the learners to participate in the process of the course creation and constitutes for them a supplementary, out of class exposure to the target language.

The second part of the paper will discuss the results of the research conducted by the author among her law students. The aim of the research was to investigate the students′ opinions about memrise as a tool which might facilitate individual learning of the specialist language, as well as to assess whether memrise may influence the test results achieved by the students during the legal English course. The paper will contrastively analyse the progress tests results achieved by the students who have used memrise to revise and recycle language material and those who have chosen traditional (non-mobile) methods of learning. The research also attempted to address the question whether the students who had been the contributors to the content of memrise courses had performed better in tests than those who had only been the users.

The author intends to present evolutionary and revolutionary changes in legal terminology. Legal terminology changes as a result of language usage, technological development, political and social changes and even economy reasons. The following research methods have been applied: the terminological analysis of the research material (empirical observation, analysis of comparable texts and parametric approach to legal terminology comparison) and the analysis of pertinent literature. The research material included legislation from the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and Australia. The author focuses on terminological changes resulting from social transformations. Selected terms and their transformation in respect to meaning and form are elaborated on in the paper. Finally, the author draws conclusions that translation of such terminology should aim at communication precision and many of them may be false friends in interlingual communication.

The article focuses on methods of teaching commercial lawyers, whose native language is not English, some linguistic aspects of drafting a contract in English. The author, whose principal occupation is teaching legal English, has created a Course on Language Aspects of English Contract for in-service lawyers. The course is aimed at teaching learners to understand and interpret English contracts written in traditional legal English (legalese) and help them develop some drafting and redrafting techniques taking into account the modern tendency growing in English speaking common law countries towards simplifying traditional legal English. A number of contracts written in different styles have been analysed, basic contract categories each characterised by certain operative words and phrases, have been established and terminology glossary have been compiled. The purpose of this paper is to present the course’s syllabi, outline and teaching methods.

Automated translation (machine translation, MT) is systematically gaining popularity among professional translators, who claim that editing MT output requires less time and effort than translating from scratch. MT technology is also offered in leading translator’s workstations, e.g., SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Déjà Vu and Wordfast. Therefore, the dilemma arises: should MT be introduced into formal translation training? In order to answer this question, first, it is necessary to understand how trainee translators actually use MT.

This study is an attempt to obtain this knowledge. The methodology applied in this investigation is text analysis. During the experiment sessions the students were asked to translate a legal text using MT tools, which in practice meant the post-editing of the MT raw output. The post-edited versions of the text underwent analysis in order to answer the following research questions:

- What are the most typical errors contained in both French and English MT output?

- How critical are the students towards the text generated by MT?

- How perceptive are the students during the post-editing task?

- Are they able to detect and correct errors using their knowledge and skills?

The results of this study suggest that the post-editing of the MT raw output is as demanding for translation students as traditional translation, however, it requires a different set of skills, such as critical thinking and perceptiveness. Therefore, a special kind of training related to the effective use of MT technology should be implemented during translation classes.

The article contains a list and brief characteristics of Latin legal maxims used in the judgments of the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland. Most of them were formulated by Roman jurists, some by medieval lawyers, and some by representatives of the modern science of law based on Roman law sources. They express universal and eternal ideas and are a significant element of the axiology of law. The presence of Latin legal maxims in the judgments of the Constitutional Tribunal demonstrates that Latin is an important element of the cultural heritage of ancient Rome and its knowledge is one of the essential tools in the workshop of a contemporary lawyer.

The article deals with the comparison of key terminology in the field of copyright in the Polish, English, Japanese and German languages. The research material consists of copyright acts binding in Poland, Great Britain, the United States of America, Japan and Germany. The terminology has been compared in order to reveal similarities and differences in the meaning. Firstly, statutory terms from the Polish, English (British and American), German and Japanese acts will be presented and discussed. Also, a list of functional equivalents (Polish, English, German and Japanese) will be presented. The task was to search for functional equivalents, and if there is partial equivalence or no equivalence, an equivalent was provided according to techniques of providing equivalents for non-equivalent terms (c.f. Kłos, Matulewska, Nowak-Korcz 2007). They were made in such a way that equivalents will correspond with the reality of the laws in the above mentioned languages. The terms have been extracted with the usage of AntConc (corpus linguistics software). The method of analysis of comparable texts has been applied as well as the one based on three categories of equivalence by Šarčević (1997): “near equivalence”, “partial equivalence” and “non-equivalence”. Special attention has been paid to system-bound terminology existing in those five legal systems. To sum up, it should be borne in mind that the copyright law has been unified almost world-wide. As a result many countries have adopted similar or almost identical principles in this respect. Therefore, there is a significant convergence of meanings of analysed copyright terms with only slight differences resulting from deeply ingrained local and national legal traditions.

Considering the overwhelming amount of media products that we are subjected to in the 21^st century and the way in which those inevitably influence our perception of reality, this research pays specific attention to the role of the media in the construction and enhancement of stereotypes in everyday life, via the language or, more specifically, specialized languages. In particular, this paper aims to investigate an American legal TV series in order to analyze the way in which legal English is used in dialogues. The major research questions are: to what extent such a kind of specialized discourse may be really understood by the greater audience? How does legal drama participate in the shaping of stereotypes relating to the legal environment in the country where it is produced, and cross-culturally, bearing in mind the prominence of “made in the USA” products in the television programming across the world? Ultimately, in the light of the previous questions, should the growing field of research in audiovisual translation extend its investigation into the area of legal English? Taking into consideration the seminal work of Pedersen (2008) and Diaz Cintas (2008) in the field of Audiovisual Translation (AVT), the study will examine the subtitling techniques employed for this atypical genre. Through the analysis of a corpus comprising several dialogues from a collection of episodes of the legal show Reckless, the paper will mostly focus on gender representations and their most common linguistically enhanced stereotypes.