I came across a very interesting article recently, published in the Jersey & Guernsey Law Review in June last year, by Roger Halson, Professor of Contract and Commercial Law at the School of Law, University of Leeds. It may interest all those readers who juggle with common and civil legal systems on a daily basis.
Category Archives: Articles
Problematic terms of art used in contracts
I am delighted to present a guest post today from Kenneth A. Adams. According to the Canadian periodical The Lawyers Weekly, “In the world of contract drafting, Ken Adams is the guru.” His book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting is widely used throughout the legal profession. He gives seminars in the U.S., Canada, and internationally, acts as a consultant and expert witness, and is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Ken’s blog contains a multitude of posts about specific terms and issues relating to contract drafting. The post below contains a number of links (terms in red) – by clicking you can find out more about each term. Over to you Ken!
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What exactly is corpus linguistics?
This post, in my mini-series of posts entitled ‘What exactly is…”, will try to give an overview of Corpus Linguistics and hopefully pique your interest to find out more.
First of all, a definition: a corpus is a collection of texts, often used to study language. These days, corpora are generally held electronically – access is much faster and analysis can be more powerful.
Reporting from Canterbury – Part 2
I hope you will enjoy this second post on the conference “Comparative Law: Engaging Translation”, once again, a subjective selection that may be of interest to you. You can find the first post here.
Asst. Prof. Cornelis Baaij, University of Amsterdam
Legal translation and the ‘Contamination’ of Comparative Legal research
As you can see from the title, Cornelis Baaij talked about the translator as a contaminant. Before the translators reading this start preparing to lynch him 🙂 I must add a caveat – he was talking about a very specific situation – the context of comparative legal research.
In brief, Baaij argues that a target-oriented approach to legal translation in the above case is not useful – that any efforts on the part of the translator to “tailor-make” the text for its audience will hinder the comparative lawyer in their task of understanding a foreign legal system. He therefore advances a literal approach – exposing the “foreignness” of the text.
Whether you agreed with his propos or not, it was certainly a very stimulating talk!
Plain language in Portugal
I watched this excellent TEDx talk some time ago, but mentioning it to someone recently reminded me that you might be interested. As you may know through the blog, my position on plain legal language is somewhat mixed – due to concerns about precision and expert interpretation. However, I certainly do agree with improving accessibility.
Sandra Fisher-Martins runs Português Claro, a training and consultancy firm that introduced plain language in Portugal and has been helping Portuguese companies and government agencies communicate clearly since 2007.
Online volunteering with the United Nations
Surprised that you can volunteer online? Well, you can! I’ve been doing this for a number of years now, and thought I would share the information with you, because I don’t think that many people are aware that they can help out from their desktop.
Why volunteer online?
“Volunteering online is an opportunity to support the cause of sustainable human development working from a computer anywhere in the world. Volunteers do not need to travel and have a great degree of flexibility in volunteering the hours that fit their schedule.”
Reporting from Poznan – Part 2
This second post on the conference Legal Translation, Court Interpreting and Comparative Legilinguistics, held in Poznan recently, contains a selection of the papers presented. My apologies to those people whose presentations have not been included for reasons of space. However, the full proceedings will be available at the end of the year, and I will post an update when they are available.
Reporting from Poznan – Part 1
Having been quite busy traveling around recently, today I would like to offer you the first of two posts reporting on the Seventh Conference on Legal Translation, Court Interpreting and Comparative Legilinguistics (Legal Linguistics), held at the Institute of Linguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, from 29 June to 1 July 2012.
I have summarized only a selection of talks, to give you a taster, but the full official proceedings of the conference are to be published at the end of the year.
Applied Language Solutions – finally, something is to be done (hopefully)
Until now I have resisted the temptation to write about the British Applied Language Solutions / Ministry of Justice court interpreting contract – I felt that so many others had said all there was to say. For a tongue-in-cheek account, see Rainy London Translations’ post which contains lots of interesting links.
However, today, when I saw two tweets, I just had to put pen to blog, as it were.
Simultaneous interpreting – from origins to a globalised world
Following last week’s post on the origins of simultaneous interpreting techniques, this short video, jointly produced by the European Parliament and the United Nations, gives an insight into interpretation at these two institutions.
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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