Legal Discourse across Cultures and Systems

Contributors

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix Vijay K. Bhatia is Professor of English at the City University of Hong Kong. His main research interests are genre analysis of professional discourse, including legal, business, newspaper, advertising and other promotional genres; ESP (theory and practice); simplification of legal and other public documents; cross-cultural and disciplinary variation in professional discourse. He has published in many international journals in these areas. He has worked on a number of projects, the most recent of which is ‘Generic Integrity in Legal Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts’, an international project in which 15 countries participated. He is also on the editorial advisory boards of several international journals. His book on Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings (1993) is widely used by researchers interested in genre theory and practice. His more recent book Worlds of Discourse (2004) has appeared in the Advances in Applied Linguistics series. Christopher N. Candlin is Senior Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics of Macquarie University, Sydney. He was the Foundation Executive Director of the Australian Government’s National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research from 1987 to 1998, and also established the Research Centre in Language in Social Life, also at Macquarie. He has held Professorships at Lancaster, UK, the City University of Hong Kong, and the UK Open University, and holds Honorary Professorships at the Universities of Lancaster, Nottingham and Cardiff in the UK. He currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Research Professor in the Centre for Health Communication Research at Cardiff University. His current research is in the fields of professional 15 Contributors x CONTRIBUTORS communication, particularly in healthcare and law, and its application to professional development and practice, and in disciplinary discourses in the academy and their interface with the world of work. He is a member of the editorial boards of several international journals, including Text & Talk, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Awareness, Journal of English for Specific Purposes, Language Teaching Research and Communication in Medicine, and co-edits (with Srikant Sarangi) the new Journal of Applied Linguistics. From 1996 to 2002, he was President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics. Marta Chroma, Head of the Foreign Language Department of the Charles University Law School in Prague, teaches legal linguistics and legal translation to both students of law and students of linguistics. Her research is based upon comparative study of the Czech laws and language on the one hand and the Anglo-American system of law and legal English on the other. She focuses on the issues of linguistics and legal interpretation of legal texts for the purposes of translation, as well as issues of equivalence and conceptual analysis for the purposes of lexicography. Her latest work is Legal Translation and the Dictionary (2004). Jan Engberg is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Language and Business Communication of the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark. His PhD thesis was a contrastive study of German and Danish civil court judgments with relevance for special genres, cognitive aspects of domain specific discourse and communication in LSP settings. The focus of his research is on communication and translation in the field of law. He is co-chair of the section on LSP communication of the German Association for Applied Linguistics (GAL) and co-editor of the international journals Hermes and LSP & Professional Communication. Paola Evangelisti Allori is Professor of English and Director of the Language Centre at the University for Sport Science (IUSM) in Rome. Her main research interests focus on the comparative description of English, particularly the uses of English in different academic and professional settings. She has published extensively in the fields of crossdisciplinary and cross-cultural discourse analysis and of contrastive rhetoric. Among her recent publications are Academic Discourse in Europe (1998), English in Academic and Professional Settings (2002, co-edited with E. Ventola), Language and Legal Concepts across Systems and Cultures (forthcoming, co-edited with V. Bhatia and C. N. Candlin). CONTRIBUTORS xi Celina Frade is a Lecturer of English for Specific Purposes in the Multidisciplinary Institute, Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, and has a PhD in Linguistics. She has done extensive research mainly on legal English, and published several articles on the topic. She has also taught legal English reading skills to Brazilian legal professionals. She is currently working on the design of ESP courses for other academic and professional areas for the undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the institute. Maurizio Gotti is Professor of...