QUALETRA FINAL CONFERENCE
Sandrine PERALDI
JUST/2011/JPEN/AG/2975
QUALETRAJUST/2011/JPEN/AG/2975
With financial support from the Criminal Justice Programme of the European Commission Directorate General Justice
More info: [email protected]
Objectives
Generic analysis of the essential document types listed in Directive 2010/64/EU with a view to defining indicators, templates, and terminology to achieve quality in legal translation of such documents
Workstream 1 Essential Documents
One of the main difficulties of legal translation is the ability to understand, to acquire and to render the lexical and discursive patterns of the domain language at stake
Culture-oriented nature of law and typical jurisprudential style
Solid understanding of the domain, and a thorough knowledge of its terminology and phraseological expressions
Rationale
Genre Analysis
Defining indicators & parameters of the EDs
Sociolinguistic approach:
Genre to be considered as class of communicative events, sharing a set of communication purposes (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993).
These communicative purposes shape the genre and gives it an internal structure and therefore becomes the decisive defining criterion.
Legal terminology
Combination of a conceptual approach and a textual approach
The corpus serves as an objective frame of reference, providing linguistic evidence of key lexical units used in the domain as well as semantic, syntactic, intercultural and phraseological information derived from the text and to be used in the term base.
The termbase/templates are developed by extracting terms and phraseology from the documents.
Textual approach
Linguistic criteria (Pearson 1998, Bowker 1998)
RepresentativitySizeCommunicative settingsDate of publicationGenre
Reliable documents
ECBACCBEEULITAUniversities with a Law FacultyUniversities with an integrated legal course for translators
Corpus building protocol
• Charges brought against a person
• Indictments charging a person of a crime
• Judgments:
• Decisions depriving a person of his/her liberty
• Decisions ending the criminal proceedings related to the criminal offence by the victim including at least a summary of the reasons for such a decision, and, if available, any other possible document essential to the victims' exercise of their rights in criminal proceedings
Essential Documents
Domain: documents related to fraud, drugs trafficking and theft
Research and deliverables have been limited to the languages spoken in the countries of the consortium partners: English (England, Ireland), Dutch (Belgium), French (France, Belgium), Italian, and Spanish
The corpus has been restricted to 3 texts per offence and per working language, which amounts to 63 authentic documents
Corpus Protocol
Building a reference corpus on the basis of the documents listed in the directive with a view of supplementing the search for parallel terminology and phraseologies found in the EDs and EAWs
Normative texts (performative discourse)Descriptive texts
Multilingual aligned EU legislation documents which are extracted on the basis of key words using Sketch Engine, complemented with translation samples.
Supporting Material
Corpus BuildingAuthentic (anonymized) documents
Sketch Engine
General parameters
Deliverable name/type (a)
Format (b)
Multilingual templates of the essential documents
Template
Templates
Termbase
Deliverable name/type (a) Format (b)
Parallel and comparable multilingual corpus
Electronic (xml)
Multilingual templates of the essential documents
Electronic and printed
List of quality parameters and indicators Electronic
Elaborated list of Essential documents Electronic
Multilingual legal termbase Electronic: xml/SDL MultiTerm (TERMit)
Deliverables
Deliverable name/type (a) Format (b)
Translation memory Digital (xml/tmx)
Publication on the findings and results Digital and print
Deliverables