LEXICAL AND SYNTAX FEATURES OF ENGLISH AND ARABIC LEGAL DISCOURSE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY
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Keywords

English
Arabic
legal discourse
comparative studies
legilinguistics

How to Cite

EL-FARAHATY, H. (2010). LEXICAL AND SYNTAX FEATURES OF ENGLISH AND ARABIC LEGAL DISCOURSE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY. Comparative Legilinguistics, 4, 61–80. https://doi.org/10.14746/cl.2010.4.6

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.

https://doi.org/10.14746/cl.2010.4.6
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