Legal Discourse across Cultures and Systems

15. Translating Terminology in Arbitration Discourse

TRANSLATING TERMINOLOGY IN ARBITRATION DISCOURSE 309 INTRODUCTION Legal language has for decades been subject to the attention of both lawyers and linguists. While the lawyers have concentrated on how to express, and subsequently identify, legal information so that law may be applied, the linguists have focused on purely linguistic aspects, such as means of expressing a tone of normativity, or of serving frequently intended vagueness of legislative texts. The purpose of the lawyers’ research into the language has mostly been to achieve more efficient legal communication (pro futuro research): “If legal language is to become a clearer and more efficient means of communication, we need to identify the features that are most likely to impede comprehension” (Tiersma 2000: 203). In practice, law students and many law practitioners rely on just one outcome of such research, namely “legal writing” — books and manuals written by experienced lawyers (or in rare cases by lawyers with a linguistic background). Linguists have generally pursued a rather static (descriptive) approach (pro praeterito) in analyzing the linguistic tools employed in legal texts; however this approach has had little or no impact upon the drafting of subsequent legal texts. Within the understanding of linguists, language for law purposes (LLP) is used to facilitate communication within legal discourse. Legal language is a variety of language strongly determined by context and the particular discourse events with which it is linked. Research into this subsystem of language consists of describing and analyzing the selection, combination and use of existing morphological, lexical and syntactic units, structures and patterns that would best serve 15 Translating Terminology in Arbitration Discourse Marta Chroma 310 MARTA CHROMA the specific stylistic, genre and discourse functions of a text in a concrete subject area and specific social context. The specificity of the discourse seems to be primarily a consequence of pragmatic considerations, reflecting the communicative purpose and needs of the users — both professionals in the respective subject field and, possibly, lay (or paralegal) persons working on legal assignments. A third group of specialist professionals who engage in researching legal language are translators. Their methods should ideally combine the approaches of both lawyers and linguists, and be based on a comparison of the source and target languages, and source and target legal systems (pro comparatione research), so that the respective legal information may be effectively communicated to the ultimate recipient of the translated text: “Obviously the first stage in successful translation is to understand the source text fully. This is then followed by the production of a target text” (Alcaraz and Hughes 2002: 3). The aim of this article is to provide a brief outline of terminological issues relevant for the translation of legislative texts dealing with the legal theme of arbitration. TERMINOLOGY General understanding Terminology, in its most common meaning as a collection of terms which represent a system of concepts in an individual subject-field (Sager 1990: 3), is a part of vocabulary for specific purposes which has been extensively described, analyzed and standardized (ISO R 1087 1990). It should be noted, however, that almost all work on terminology pursued by ISO and their national affiliates has been aimed at what Bečka (1992: 73) calls “technological terms”, designating phenomena of technological research and sciences. Not a lot has been accomplished in the area of researching into culturally deeply rooted legal terminologies although there are countries which pay respect to their language — or languages — of law, such as Canada, as evidenced by the bijural terminological research pursued by the Canadian Department of Justice.1 1 For more information see: http://www.canada.justice.gc.ca/en/ps/bj/harm/. TRANSLATING TERMINOLOGY IN ARBITRATION DISCOURSE 311 It has generally been agreed that terms designating concepts of any branch of knowledge should be accurate, concise, easy to spell and pronounce; and should allow the formation of derivatives and be linguistically correct (Felber 1984: 181–2). Thomas (1993: 46) suggests that, preferably, a term should also be monosemous (one meaning) and at the same time mononymous (one word), and be a member of a term system. Terminology is traditionally considered to be the basis of any LSP (language for specific purposes) variety. Moreover, our own experience has suggested that lawyers without sufficient linguistic background training may use the concepts terminology and LSP variety indiscriminately, thus reducing the language of law to a mere set of legal terms. Considering the proportion of terminology and “non-terminology” in a subject...