Translation Studies: Some Recent Developments

No abstracts

Regulative Strategies in Arbitration Law Uncitral Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (UNCITRAL) compared with Arbitration Law of the People's Republic of China

This paper is concerned with the laying down of the law in international and domestic arbitration. Interest centres on regulative and constitutive functions, and an analysis of realisation patterns of regulative (directive) acts is reported. The focus is on the linguistic realisation patterns of obligation, prohibition, and permission in terms of modal verbs and constitutive rules.The findings show that the language of the law characteristically select patterns of directives which are specific to the legal domain. Face redress typically used in everyday communication as well as business interaction is not a device used in arbitration law. Moreover, the linguistic devices employed differ as regards different parts of the law. Modal verbs are typically applied for action rules, whereas constitutive rules are mainly reserved for stipulation rules and definition rules.The analysis offers a comparison of Unicitral Model Law and domestic law. Finally, attention is paid to the adequacy of the chosen linguistic realisation patterns as regards simplification/ easifi cation of legal expressions. The results are compared to those obtained in a previous study of Contract Law.  

The Performance of Legal Discourse

No abstract

An analysis of legal speech acts in English Contract Law. 'It is hereby performed'

This paper is concerned with the language used in legal speech acts in legislative texts in the field of English Contract Law as the object of study. It points to a division of legal English in subdomains with 'the language of the law' as a particular sublanguage. Interest centers on regulative and constitutive functions, and an analysis of realization patterns of directive acts is reported. The findings show that the language of the law characteristically selects patterns of directives which differ in level of directness from the patterns typically selected in everyday conversational English. This difference can be explained with reference to 'felicity conditions'

An Analysis of Regulative Speech Acts in English Contracts - Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

This paper deals with the language used to express legal speech acts in simple contracts within the field of English Contract Law. The central objects of study are regulative functions, i.e. directive and commissive speech acts with a particular view to establishing realisation patterns of these rhetorical functions. The hypothesis that the speech acts subjecte to analysis are homogeneously distributed linguistic realisations typical for simple contracts is tested by means of partly manual analysis, partly machine-based quantification of the data of investigation. The findings show that statistically significant items are distributed homogenously in the corpus examined, and that the choice of individual strategies can be interpreted in terms of the face redress required by the socio-pragmatic situation

"Sorry does not pay my bills". The Handling of Complaints in Everyday Interaction/Cross-Cultural Business Interaction

This article is concerned with the teaching of pragmatic functions when training stu-dents for a future career in intercultural business communication. Having outlined six important constellations likely to result in success or failure, we focus on strategies for the successful handling of customer complaints seen in comparison with responses to complaints in everyday interactions. It is suggested that transfer of behaviour con-sidered suitable in everyday face-to-face interaction to business interaction may lead to unsuccessful processing of customer complaints

Introduction

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Editorial: Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication Problems

This editorial to the special issue of RiL dedicated to relevance theory and problems of intercultural communication addresses the general requirements that a theory of communication must meet to be applicable to the analysis of intercultural communication. Then it discusses criticism levelled against Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness on the grounds that these theories were not universal enough to be applied to all data. Finally, it offers some remarks on the applicability of relevance theory to intercultural pragmatics

Reconsidering power and distance

A wide range of studies indicate that power and distance affect the production and interpretation of language. However, this paper argues that greater consideration needs to be given to the conceptual nature of these dimensions, and to terminological usage. In the first half of the paper, the need for this consideration is explained. A number of pragmatic studies are examined, and this reveals that authors often use the same terms with different meanings, or different terms with the same meaning, and that the parameters are rarely explicitly defined. Then the paper reviews recent calls for an extra parameter of interlocutor relations to be added: for affect to be separated from distance. In the second half of the paper, relevant social psychological research is reported, and it is concluded that the number of ‘horizontal’ dimensions of interlocutor relations needs to be reconsidered. Power, on the other hand, emerges as a robust and relatively unitary dimension, yet its label has connotations that may not be cross-culturally valid