Distinguishing specialised discourse : the example of juridical texts on industrial property rights and trademark legislation

In this paper, we have given an overview of computational linguistic tools available to us, which can be used to produce raw material for the lexicographic description of a specialised language. The underlying idea of our method is the following: what is significantly more frequent in a domain-specific text than in a general language reference text may be a term (or collocation) of the domain. In the near future, our tools will be integrated in a web-based environment in order to make them available for textbased research, e.g. in the humanities, whenever needed. The researcher interested in term or phraseology candidate extraction of a certain domain would identify and upload texts to be searched, and the tools would be running on servers of e.g. computational linguistics centres. The researcher would select tools to be applied and receive the analysis results over the network

A Priest's "Uncircumcised Heart" Some Theological-Political Remarks on a Rashi's Gloss in Tractate Sanhedrin and its Latin Translation in Extractiones de Talmud

The Latin translation of a relatively short gloss from Rashi's commentary on the Tal- mud provides an insight into the politics of conversion in the French-German Jewry between the 10th-13th centuries and allows to assume that the Hebrew term kômer might be used in post-Talmudic commentaries in order to designate Jewish apostates who converted to Christianity, either deliberately or under duress. The Latin transla- tor of the Talmud seems to be aware of this connotation and makes these inter-cultural implications manifest

Research on Phraseology Across Continents

The second volume of the IDP series contains papers by phraseologists from five continents: Europe, Australia, North America, South America and Asia, which were written within the framework of the project Intercontinental Dialogue on Phraseology, prepared and coordinated by Joanna Szerszunowicz, conducted by the University of Bialystok in cooperation with Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan. The book consists of the following parts: Dialogue on Phraseology, General and Corpus Linguistics & Phraseology, Lexicography & Phraseology, Contrastive Linguistics, Translation & Phraseology, Literature, Cultural Studies, Education & Phraseology. Dialogue contains two papers written by widely recognised phraseologists: professor Anita Naciscione from Latvia and professor Irine Goshkheteliani.The volume has been financed by the Philological Department of the University of Bialysto

Collocations on the way : How words come together in Russian

This thesis addresses the topic of collocations and their behavior based on Russian language data. In the course of four articles, I develop a better understanding of collocations that is based on a corpus-driven approach. Collocations are defined as statistically significant co-occurrences of tokens or lexemes within a syntactic phrase that are extracted by statistics-based automatic analysis tools and are restricted to various extents: from semantically not-idiomatic to full idioms. In the article “Evaluation of collocation extraction methods for the Russian language” (2017), my co-authors and I discuss of the methods used to extract statistical collocations and provide results pertaining to the comparison of five metrics for extracting statistics-based collocations as well as the raw frequency. First, this research has demonstrated that the results of the discussed metrics are often correlated and, second, that the degree of idiomaticity of the extracted units varies significantly. In “What do we get from extracting collocations? Linguistic analysis of automatically obtained Russian MWEs” (2015), I offer a comparison of the empirical and phraseological perspectives on collocations and introduce research where I attempt to position empirical collocations within the scope of a phraseological theory. This research demonstrates that empirical collocations have different tendencies to form idiomatic lexical units and I reveal the shortcomings of describing the idiomaticity of expressions in terms of strict classes. In “Choosing between lexeme vs. token in Russian collocations” (2019), I examine grammatical profiling as a method used to define the optimal level of representation for collocations. I have demonstrated that collocations have different distributional preferences across the corpus. I have also analyzed the relationship between token and lexeme collocations based on the degree to which their grammatical profiles resemble the grammatical profiles of their headwords (although the border between the two types is not clear-cut). I also offered a plausible method of differentiating between these two collocation types. Finally, in “Constructional generalization over Russian collocations” (2016) my co-authors and I present the main concepts of Construction Grammar and introduce the research where a substantial number of automatically extracted collocations were demonstrated to form clusters of words that belong to the same semantic class, even when they are not idiomatic. Such constructional generalizations have shown that there is a more abstract level on which collocations can be stable as a class rather than on the level of single collocations.Tarkastelen väitöskirjassani kollokaatioita ja niiden käyttäytymistä venäjänkielisessä tutkimusaineistossa. Väitöskirja koostuu neljästä artikkelista, joissa pyrin tuomaan esille korpusvetoiseen tutkimukseen pohjautuvan näkemykseni kollokaatioista. Kollokaatio määritellään työssä lausekkeessa ilmeneväksi tilastollisesti merkitseväksi sanaesiintymien tai lekseemien yhteisesiintymäksi, joka on erotettavissa juoksevasta tekstistä käyttämällä tilastopohjaista automaattista analyysityökalua ja jossa on havaittavissa tiettyjä käyttöä rajoittavia tekijöitä. Nämä tekijät voivat vaihdella ei-idiomaattisista semanttisista rajoituksista täysin idiomatisoituneisiin ilmauksiin. Artikkelissa Evaluation of collocation extraction methods for the Russian language (2017) käsittelen yhdessä muiden kirjoittajien kanssa erilaisia tapoja, joilla automaattisesti erotettuja kollokaatioita voidaan evaluoida, ja vertaan viiden tilastolliseen analyysiin perustuvan kollokaatioiden erottelutyökalun antamia tuloksia venäjänkielisessä raakadatassa ilmeneviin frekvensseihin. Tutkimus osoittaa, että eri työkalujen antamat tulokset korreloivat keskenään ja että niiden avulla erotettujen yksiköiden idiomaattisuuden aste vaihtelee merkittävästi. Artikkelissa What do we get from extracting collocations? Linguistic analysis of automatically obtained Russian MWEs (2015) vertailen kollokaation tulkintaa empiirisessä korpustutkimuksessa ja fraseologian teorioissa ja pyrin selvittämään empiirisin menetelmin erotettujen kollokaatioiden asemaa fraseologian tutkimuksen tarjoamassa teoreettisessa viitekehyksessä. Tutkimukseni osoittaa, että empiirisin keinoin erotetuilla kollokaatioilla on toisistaan poikkeavia taipumuksia muodostaa idiomaattisia leksikaalisia yksiköitä, minkä seurauksena idiomaattisten ilmausten jakaminen selvästi erillisiin luokkiin on ongelmallista. Artikkelissani Choosing between lexeme vs. token in Russian collocations (2019) pyrin osoittamaan, että ilmausten kieliopillinen profilointi on keino, jolla voidaan määritellä kollokaatioiden representaatio optimaalisella tavalla. Tutkimukseni tulokset osoittavat, että kollokaatioiden distributionaaliset preferenssit eroavat korpusaineistossa ja että sanaesiintymä- ja lekseemikollokaatioiden välistä suhdetta on mahdollista selvittää vertaamalla kollokaation ja sen pääsanan kieliopillisia profiileja. Kahden kollokaatiotyypin väliseen rajanvetoon liittyy tiettyjä ongelmia, joiden ratkaisemiseen tarjoan artikkelissa käyttökelpoisen ja toimivan menetelmän. Artikkelissa Constructional generalization over Russian collocations (2016) kollokaatioita tarkastellaan konstruktiokieliopin viitekehyksessä ja osoitetaan, että suuri osa automaattisesti erotetuista kollokaatioista muodostaa samaan semanttiseen kenttään kuuluvien sanojen klustereita, vaikka sanoihin ei välttämättä liittyisikään idiomaattisuutta. Tällaiset konstruktioita koskevat yleistykset ovat osoittaneet, että on olemassa yksittäisiä kollokaatioita ylempi abstraktiotaso, jolla kollokaatiot voidaan hahmottaa luokkina

The challenges of legal translation: An error analysis of trainees' translations

Negli ultimi anni, in un mondo sempre più globalizzato ed interconnesso, è emersa la necessità di traduzioni in ambito legale. Lo scopo di questa tesi è quello di analizzare e valutare i principali errori delle traduzioni dall’inglese all’italiano di testi legali da parte di traduttori non esperti. I partecipanti di questo studio sono gli studenti e le studentesse del secondo anno della laurea magistrale in “Lingue Moderne per la Comunicazione e Cooperazione Internazionale” dell’Università di Padova. Sono state analizzate le traduzioni di tre diverse tipologie di testi legali in modo tale da ottenere una valutazione accurata. L’analisi ha fatto emergere le seguenti ipotesi. La tipologia del testo legale svolge un ruolo fondamentale dal momento che il tipo di testo di partenza influenza in maniera preponderante il testo di arrivo specialmente a livello lessicale e sintattico. Un ulteriore fattore che incide nella difficoltà della traduzione legale è la differenza tra i sistemi legali: in questo caso, si fa riferimento ai sistemi di civil law e di common law e alle rispettive fonti. Infine, questo studio offre un risvolto didattico destinato ai futuri docenti di traduzione legale inglese-italiano: gli insegnanti potrebbero avere una panoramica preliminare delle principali difficoltà degli studenti e pertanto potranno prepararsi adeguatamente per fornire soluzioni idonee.There has been a remarkable growth in legal translation in the last years due to globalization and the world’s connectedness. The aim of this study was to examine and evaluate which are the main translation errors committed by non-expert translators when dealing with legal texts in English and Italian. The participants of this study were students attending a master’s degree in translation at the University of Padua. The texts analysed for this dissertation include three different genres of legal texts in order to have a better understanding of the results of this research. The findings revealed the following hypothesis. The legal text’s typology mostly influenced the lexical and syntactic choices in the target text (TT). Furthermore, one of the major issues was the difference between legal systems, that is common law and civil law and their respective sources. Lastly, this dissertation may turn out to be a useful resource for teachers of English-Italian translation as they could be able to predict the main difficulties of trainee students in translating legal texts from English into Italian and, as a consequence, provide adequate solutions

The obligation of host states to accord the standard of “full protection and security” to foreign investments under international investment law

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe analysis of this thesis is to examine whether foreign investors can fully rely on the standard of FPS in BITs for the protection of their investments in the territories of host States which has been mandated to States by international law. This question cannot be answered without giving insights into the content and structure of the origin of FPS standard and adopts a dynamic based-perspective of the interpretation of FPS under VCLT 1969, encompassing the relationship between FPS and CIL. It investigates the tribunals’ interpretation of the clause using case laws and literatures to identify and explore the underlying explanatory process behind tribunals’ case findings and outcomes. The study examines the critical realism that the obligation of FPS standard does not place absolute liability to a host State, rather the exercise of a reasonable degree of vigilance. It evaluates the controversy surrounding the relationships between FPS and FET, and illuminates on how the two standards may co-evolve which has led to various arbitral tribunals’ divergence opinions interpretation of the two principles. The evaluation of the application of FPS to digital assets is dynamic in this research as it addresses the nature of threats investors face globally today over cyber attacks of digital investments. The thesis also emphasis on balancing up investors’ rights and obligation, which explains the measures that States can apply to prevent foreign investors from engaging in illegitimate activities. Having look at all these issues, circumstances, and the controversies surrounding FPS standard, the result found is that there is a existence of a gap in this area of the law, that would mean that foreign investors cannot completely rely on the principle of FPS for the protection of their investments in the territories of the host unless this lacunae is properly filled by both the States and arbitral tribunals, especially the tribunals’ interpretative meaning of the standard of FPS

LEGAL STYLE MARKERS ANO THEIR TRANSLATION IN WRITTEN PLEADINGS BEFORE THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

This corpus-based study investigates language use in the occluded genre of written pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights through the paradigms of legal phraseology and Translation Studies. The analysis is carried out on three subcorpora of authentic texts: (a) pleadings translated from Russian into English, (b) pleadings translated from Italian into English and (c) pleadings originally drafted in English. Legal language is intricate and formulaic, and frequently makes recourse to prefabricated patterns and routines. Legal phraseology is a major challenge for professional legal translators, and yet its translation has not received much scholarly attention until recently. Legal phraseological units are prefabricated patterns that form the matrix of legal texts and reveal interesting information about both the language and structure of the genre of written pleadings. Over the last thirty years, linguistic deviations occurring in the translation process have constituted one of the main areas within Translation Studies. It has been postulated that translated language has distinctive linguistic characteristics. Legal translation, in addition to linguistic factors, is conditioned by the tension between the legal systems involved, which can result in peculiar language dynamics in the translation of legal texts. This study draws inspiration from Toury\u2019s (1995) and Chesterman\u2019s (2004a) works to describe the different dynamics of translated language, applying a combination of translation norms and universals to identify and describe regularities in translated pleadings. This work is carried out using both linguistic and translational insights in order to demonstrate empirically how written pleadings can be characterised in terms of their phraseological content and how translated pleadings differ from non-translated pleadings. Distributional patterns of recurrent and anomalous legal phraseological units are compared across the corpora and analysed for typicality of frequencies and patterning as well as for quantity and quality of linguistic variation. The results contain a list of legal style markers typical of this genre, obtained in a translational and phraseological perspective. The list supplements the rather scant information about the language of written pleadings at the European Court of Human Rights. The analysis also provides confirmatory evidence of the differences between translated and non-translated texts, specifically, proving the co-existence of two opposite tendencies in translation: conventionalisation (translation of source text textemes with conventional repertoremes of the target environment) and discourse transfer (introduction of prefabricated patterns from the source language). The results may also be of some use and applicability for Russian-to-English and Italian-to-English translators, helping them avoid interference, use of unnatural or overly conservative patterns

Translating Islamic Law: the postcolonial quest for minority representation

This research sets out to investigate how culture-specific or signature concepts are rendered in English-language discourse on Islamic, or ‘shariʿa’ law, which has Arabic roots. A large body of literature has investigated Islamic law from a technical perspective. However, from the perspective of linguistics and translation studies, little attention has been paid to the lexicon that makes up this specialised discourse. Much of the commentary has so far been prescriptive, with limited empirical evidence. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by exploring how ‘culturalese’ (i.e., ostensive cultural discourse) travels through language, as evidenced in the self-built Islamic Law Corpus (ILC), a 9-million-word monolingual English corpus, covering diverse genres on Islamic finance and family law. Using a mixed methods design, the study first quantifies the different linguistic strategies used to render shariʿa-based concepts in English, in order to explore ‘translation’ norms based on linguistic frequency in the corpus. This quantitative analysis employs two models: profile-based correspondence analysis, which considers the probability of lexical variation in expressing a conceptual category, and logistic regression (using MATLAB programming software), which measures the influence of the explanatory variables ‘genre’, ‘legal function’ and ‘subject field’ on the choice between an Arabic loanword and an endogenous English lexeme, i.e., a close English equivalent. The findings are then interpreted qualitatively in the light of postcolonial translation agendas, which aim to preserve intangible cultural heritage and promote the representation of minoritised groups. The research finds that the English-language discourse on Islamic law is characterised by linguistic borrowing and glossing, implying an ideologically driven variety of English that can be usefully labelled as a kind of ‘Islamgish’ (blending ‘Islamic’ and ‘English’) aimed at retaining symbols of linguistic hybridity. The regression analysis confirms the influence of the above-mentioned contextual factors on the use of an Arabic loanword versus English alternatives