Keywords
Arabic
legal discourse
comparative studies
legilinguistics
How to Cite
Abstract
This paper discusses the common lexical and grammatical features of legal discourse in
English and Arabic.6 The rationale behind this analysis is to compare and contrast the discourse of
both languages, list the similarities and differences between them and come up with the most
problematic areas in legal translation. It is worth mentioning that features of Arabic legal discourse
have not been researched before, thus, I have taken the features of legal English as headlights
according to which I will analyze the corpus of Arabic legal documents. These features, however,
are not specific to one particular type of written language of the law. By type of language is meant
the different types of legal texts such as legislations, contracts, official documents, court
proceedings, etc. For this purpose, authentic samples of different English and Arabic legal
documents have been consulted. These texts, obtained from law professionals, include private legal
documents such as tenancy agreements, employment contracts, correspondences between solicitors
and clients, reports to the court, birth certificates, and marriage certificates. Other documents
include selected legislative and international documents. To this effect, the United Nations (UN)
website, other translation books such as Mansoor (1965), Hatim, Shunnaq and Buckley (1995) are
consulted.
References
Abdul-Raof, Hussein. 2000. Arabic Stylistics: A Course Book. Wiesbaden: Harraso Witz.
Alcaraz, varó, Enrique and Brian, Hughes. 2002. Translation Practices Explained, LegalTranslation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Alexy, Robert. 1989. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of RationalDiscourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Al-Qinai, Jamal. 1999. Explication vs. Implication in English-Arabic Translation.Theoretical Linguistics 25: 235-255.
Asensio, M. Roberto. 2003. Translating Official Documents. Manchester: St Jerome.
Badawi, Elsaid, Carter, M.G and Gully, Adrian. 2004. Modern Written Arabic: AComprehensive Grammar, London/New York: Routledge.
Baker, Mona. 1992. In Other Words. London/New York: Routledge.
Cao, Deborah. 2007. Translating Law. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Charrow, V.R. and Crandall, J. 1978. Legal Language: What is it and What can do weabout it?. The American Dialect Society Conference/Georgetown NWAVEConference, Washington, D.C.
Charrow, V.R. et al. 1982. ―Characteristics and Functions of Legal Language‖. InSublanguage: Studies of Language in Restricted Semantic Domain, ed.Kittredge, Richard and John Lehrberger, 175-189. Berlin/New York: Walter deGrayter.
Charrow, R.P. and Charrow, V.R. 1979a. Comprehension of Standard Jury Instructions:A Psycologistic Approach. Columbia Law Review 79._____1979b. Making Legal Language Understandable: A Psycholinguistic of the JuryInstructions. Columbia Law Review 79.
Conley et al. 1978. The Power of Language: Presentational Style in the Courtroom. DukeLaw Journal 78: 1375-99.
Conley, John M. and William M.O‘Barr. 1998. Just Words: Law, Language and Power.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Coulthard, Malcolm. and Johnson, Alison. 2007. An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics:Language in Evidence. London: Routledge.
Crystal, D. and Davy, D. 1969. Investigating English Style. London: Longman.
Danet, B. 1976. Language and the Construction of Reality in the Courtroom. Working Papers. Boston University._____. 1980. Language in the Legal Process. Law and Society Review 14, no. 3: 447-564._____1985. ‗Legal Discourse‘. In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. T.A. van Dijk,273-291. London: Academic Press.
Ebeid, R. Y. and Young, M. J. L. 1976. Some Arabic Legal Documents of the OttomanPeriod. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Edzard, Lutz. 1996. Stylistic Elements in the Use of Arabic as Language of Diplomacy:
Recent Developments in United Nations Context. Die Welt des Islams 36 no. 1:25-58._____ .1997. Language as a Medium of Legal Norm: The Topics of ‗War and Peace‘ and‗Human Rights‘ in bi-and Multilateral Treaties with Arab States andOrganizations‘. In Edzard and Szyska (1997), Encounters of Words and Texts:
Intercultural Studies in Honor of Stefan Wild, Hildesheim /New York: GeorgOlms Verlag.
_____ .1998. Language as a Medium of Legal Norms: Implications of the Use of Arabicas a Language in the United Nations System, Berlin: Duncker and Humblot.
Erickson, B. et al. 1978. Speech Style and Impression Format in Court Setting: theEffects of Powerful and Powerless Speech. Journal of Experimental SocialPsychology 14: 266-279.
Fowler, R. 1991. Language in News. Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London:Routledge.
Garre, Marrianne. 1999. Human Rights in Translation: Legal Concepts in DifferentLanguages. Denmark: Copenhagen Business School Press.
Gibbons, John. 1994. Language and the Law. London/ New York: Longman.
_____. 2003. Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction of the Language in the JusticeSystem. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goodrich, Peter.1987. Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and LegalAnalysis. Macmillan Press.
Gustafsson, M. 1975. Some Syntactic Properties of English Law Langauge. Turku/Finland: University of Turku, 4.Haigh, Rupert. 2004. Legal English. London: Cavendish Publishing.
Hassan, Aboudi, J. 2005a. Repetition as a Means of Disambiguation, Turjuman 14, no 1:85-111.
Hatim, Basil. 1994. English-Arabic-English Translation: A Practical Guide. Morocco:The King Fahd School of Translation.
Hatim, Basil and I. Mason. 1997. The Translator as Communicator. London/ New York:Routletledge.
Holes, Clive. 1984. ‗Textual Approximation in the Teaching of Academic Writing toArab Students: A Contrastive Approach‘. In J. Swales and H. Mustafa (ed):English for Specific Purposes in the Arab World, Birmingham: University ofAston.
_____. 2004. Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties, Washington DC:Georgetown University Press.
Kittredge, Richard and John Lehrberger. 1982. Sublanguage: Studies of Language inRestricted Semantic Domain. Berlin/New York: Walter de Grayter.
Kurzon, Dennis. 1986. It is Hereby Performed: Explorations in Legal Speech Acts.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lataiwish, Muftah S. 1995. An Analysis of Literary Translation Arabic/English. Un-Published PhD Thesis: University of Glasgow.
Matulewska, Alexandra. 2007. Lingua Legis in Translation, Europaischer Verlag derWissenschaften, Peter Lang.
Maley, Yon. 1994. ‗The Language of the Law‘. In Gibbons: Language and the Law.London New York: Longman.
Mansoor, M. 1965a. Legal and Documentary Arabic Reader (vol. 1), Leiden: E.J.Brill.
______1965b. Legal and Documentary Arabic Reader (vol. 2), Leiden: E.J.Brill.
Mellinkoof, David. 1963. The Language of the Law, Boston: Little, Brown.
_____ 1983. ‗The Myth of Precision and the Law Dictionary‘, UCLA. Law Review.31:423.
Meredith, Clive, R. 1979. ‗Some Notes on Legal English‘. Meta 24, no. 1: 54-67.
Newmark, Peter .1982. Approaches to Translation, Oxford: Pergamon.
_____ .1988. A Textbook to Translation, London: Prentice Hall.
O‘Barr, William, M. 1982. Linguistic Evidence: Language, Power and Strategy in theCourtroom. New York: Academic Press.
Palmer, F. R. 1990. Modality and the English Modals, London: Longman.
Quirk, Randolph, S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, and J. Svartvik. 1985. A ComprehensiveGrammar of the English Language, London: Longman.
Ryding, Karin C. 2005. A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Ńarčević, Susan. 1997. New Approach to Legal Translation. London/ Boston: KluwerLaw International.
Schäffner, Christina. 1997. ‗Strategies of translating political Texts‘. In Text Typologyand Translation, ed. Trosborg, A. Amsterdam/Phliladelphia: John BenjaminsPublishing Company.
Shunnaq, A. 2000. Arabic – English Translation of Political Speeches. Perspectives:Studies in Translatology 8, no. 3: 207-228.
Sulieman, Yasir. 1999. Arabic Grammar and Linguistics. Great Britain: Curzon.
Tiersma, Peter M. 1999. Legal Language. Chicago/London: The University of ChicagoPress.
Trosborg, A. 1995a. Introduction: Special Issue on Laying down the Law-DiscourseAnalysis of Legal Institutions. Journal of Pragmatics 23, no. 1: 1-5.
_____. 1995b. ‗Statutes and Contracts: An Analysis of Legal Speech Acts in the EnglishLanguage of Law‘. Journal of Pragmatics 23, no. 1: 31-53.
_____. 1997. Rhetorical Strategies in Legal Language: Discourse Analysis of Statutesand Contracts. Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag Tubingen
License
When submitting a paper the author agrees to the following publishing agreement and processing personal data.
PUBLICATION AGREEMENT, COPYRIGHT LICENSE, PERSONAL DATA PROCESSING CONSENT
This is a publication agreement and copyright license (“Agreement”) regarding a written manuscript currently submitted via Pressto platform
(“Article”) to be published in Comparative Legilinguistics International Journal for Legal Communication (“Journal”).
The parties to this Agreement are:
the Author or Authors of the submitted article (individually, or if more than one author, collectively, “Author”) and Comparative Legilinguistics International Journal for Legal Communication (“Publisher”), address al. Niepodległości 4, 61-874 Poznań, represented by its editor in chief Aleksandra Matulewska.
§1. LICENSE OF COPYRIGHT
a) The Author and the Publisher agree that the Author grants a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which is incorporated herein by reference and is further specified at Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0 copyright license in the Article to the general public.
b) The Author grants to the Publisher a royalty-free, worldwide nonexclusive license to publish, reproduce, display, distribute, translate and use the Article in any form, either separately or as part of a collective work, including but not limited to a nonexclusive license to publish the Article in an issue of the Journal, copy and distribute individual reprints of the Article, authorize reproduction of the entire Article in another publication, and authorize reproduction and distribution of the Article or an abstract thereof by means of computerized retrieval systems (such as Westlaw, Lexis and SSRN). The Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in the Article, and all rights not expressly granted in this Agreement.
c) The Author grants to the Publisher the power to assign, sublicense or otherwise transfer any and all licenses expressly granted to the Publisher under this Agreement.
d) Republication. The Author agrees to require that the Publisher be given credit as the original publisher in any republication of the Article authorized by the Author. If the Publisher authorizes any other party to republish the Article under the terms of paragraphs 1c and 1 of this Agreement, the Publisher shall require such party to ensure that the Author is credited as the Author.
§2. EDITING OF THE ARTICLE
a) The Author agrees that the Publisher may edit the Article as suitable for publication in the Journal. To the extent that the Publisher’s edits amount to copyrightable works of authorship, the Publisher hereby assigns all right, title, and interest in such edits to the Author.
§3. WARRANTIES
a) The Author represents and warrants that to the best of the Author’s knowledge the Article does not defame any person, does not invade the privacy of any person, and does not in any other manner infringe upon the rights of any person. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the Publisher against all such claims.
b) The Author represents and warrants that the Author has full power and authority to enter into this Agreement and to grant the licenses granted in this Agreement.
c) The Author represents and warrants that the Article furnished to the Publisher has not been published previously. For purposes of this paragraph, making a copy of the Article accessible over the Internet, including, but not limited to, posting the Article to a database accessible over the Internet, does not constitute prior publication so long as the as such copy indicates that the Article is not in final form, such as by designating such copy to be a “draft,” a “working paper,” or “work-in-progress”. The Author agrees to hold harmless the Publisher, its licensees and distributees, from any claim, action, or proceeding alleging facts that constitute a breach of any warranty enumerated in this paragraph.
§4. TERM
a) The agreement was concluded for an unspecified time.
§5. PAYMENT
a) The Author agrees and acknowledges that the Author will receive no payment from the Publisher for use of the Article or the licenses granted in this Agreement.
b) The Publisher agrees and acknowledges that the Publisher will not receive any payment from the Author for publication by the Publisher.
§6. ENTIRE AGREEMENT
a) This Agreement supersedes any and all other agreements, either oral or in writing, between the Author and the Publisher with respect to the subject of this Agreement. This Agreement contains all of the warranties and agreements between the parties with respect to the Article, and each party acknowledges that no representations, inducements, promises, or agreements have been made by or on behalf of any party except those warranties and agreements embodied in this Agreement.
b) In all cases not regulated by this Agreement, legal provisions of Polish Copyright Act and Polish Civil Code shall apply.
c) Any disputes arising from the enforcement of obligations connected with this Agreement shall be resolved by a court competent for the headquarters of the Publisher.
d) Any amendments or additions to the Agreement must be made in writing and signed by authorised representative of both parties, otherwise being ineffective.
e) This Agreement is signed electronically and the submission of the article via the PRESSto platform is considered as the conclusion of the Agreement by the Author and the Publisher.
f) Clause for consent to the processing of personal data - general
g) The Author shall give his or her consent to the processing of their personal data in accordance with the Act of 10 May 2018 on the protection of personal data and Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of persons physical in connection with the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46 / EC (General Data Protection Regulation) for the purpose and in connection with making publications available on the PRESSto scientific journals platform and DeGruyter platform, guaranteeing the security of services rendered, and improving them.
I HAVE READ AND AGREE FULLY WITH THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT.
The Author The Publisher