Defining Brazilian legal terminology/concepts in English: a relevance-based approach

• Autore: Celina Frade
• Carica: The A. is Associate Professor of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at the Department of Technologies and Languages, Multidisciplinary Institute, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Pagine: 225-249

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Def‌ining Brazilian legal terminology/concepts in English:

a relevance-based approach

CELI NA FRA DE∗

SUMM ARY:1. Introduction – 2. The contextual background – 3. Relevance and infor-

mation processing – 4. The organization and the analysis of the STF’s legal glossary –

5. Def‌ining Brazilian legal terminology/concepts in English – 6. Discussion – 7. Final

remarks – 8. Appendix

If, in everyday situations, there is seldom any room for doubt and interpretation –

this is not solved by the situation, the conditions and the surrounding of the

utterance – then, there is, however, in legal usages of the language,

more room for doubt and interpretation1.

1. INT RODU CTI ON

The awareness that law and language are strictly connected is shared by

several areas of knowledge, including information and communication tech-

nologies. According to Francesconi et al.2, they are “characterized by the

coexistence of two autonomous but structurally similar systems: both are

endowed with rules that underlie the construction of the system itself, that

guide its evolution and guarantee its consistency”. In this context, electronic

media with the aid of computer technology have proved very useful to pro-

vide access to institutional discourses and specialized knowledge in legal do-

mains to a wide range of users across countries and languages. According to

Agar3, institutional frames, user frames and directives comprise the segments

∗The A. is Associate Professor of English for Specif‌ic Purposes (ESP) at the Department

of Technologiesand Languages, Multidisciplinar y Institute, FederalRural University of Rio

de Janeiro, Brazil.

1B. WENN STRÖM ,The lawyer and the language, Uppsala, Iustus Förlag,1999, p. 129.

2E. FRAN CESC ONI, S. MONTEMAGNI, W. PETERS, D. TISC ORNI A,Integrating a

bottom-up and top-down methodology for building semantic resources for the multilingual legal

domain, in Francesconi E., Montemagni S., PetersW., Tiscornia D. (eds.), “Semantic Process-

ing of Legal Texts. Where the Language of Law Meets the Lawof Language”, Berlin, Springer,

2010, p. 96.

3M. AGAR,Institutional discourse, Vol. 5, 1985, n. 3, p. 148.

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226 Informatica e diritto /Diritto, linguaggio e tecnologie dell’informazione

of institutional discourses and represent “an intermediate level between the

human contact which led to the discourse and the broader characteristics of

the society in which it was embedded”.

In particular, the discourse of the courts (at any level), one of the most

formally and rigidly structured institutions in every society, produce a spe-

cialized language which involves “the linking of general and abstract legisla-

tive statements to their linguistic manifestation”4. In Brazil, a Portuguese-

speaking country, the Supreme Federal Court’s (hereinafter STF) off‌icial

website displays information about its history and operation in English (and

Spanish) in an attempt to interact more effectively with foreign users un-

der legal globalization. It also includes an on-line legal glossary in English

with the translated def‌inition of some key terminology/concepts of Brazil’s

civil law system mostly extracted from legislation and court cases. Although

specif‌ically aimed at the “international reader”, the glossary may be a useful

reference tool for Law students, legal linguists, translators and laypeople as

well.

The aim of this article is to provide a linguistic analysis of how legal ter-

minology/concepts are def‌ined in the glossary in the light of the principle of

relevance5and consistency. We claim that:

a) the glossary will contain relevant information if and only if the def‌ini-

tions are partly assumed by earlier acts of comprehension;

b) information provided in the def‌initions will be relevant if it is able to

produce contextual effects and

c) informationprovided requires the least effort on the part of the reader

in order to be worth processing.

Otherwise, it will not fulf‌ill the necessary and suff‌icient conditions for

relevance in this specif‌ic institutional context. At the same time, we dis-

cuss how new trends in information/terminology processing can improve

the quality of on-line specialized glossaries.

The assumption is that the making of the STF’s glossary involved the

compilation of terminology/concepts extracted from a representative body

of legislative and court texts in Portuguese which was further processed by

terminologists/translators and legal experts. Moreover, we assume that the

selective and translation methodology was both controlled and supported

4E. FRAN CESC ONI, S. M ONTEMAGNI, W.P ETERS,D. T ISCOR NIA,op. cit., p. 96.

5D. SPER BER, D. WI LSON ,Relevance. Communication and cognition, Oxford, Basil

Blackwell, 1986.