Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings by Stanislaw Go?d?-Roszkowski Gianluca Pontrandolfo

Author:Stanislaw Go?d?-Roszkowski,Gianluca Pontrandolfo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

There are no apparent general patterns at work in this group of examples, but they do indicate one of the advantages of working with a translation corpus: a rich and sometimes surprising array of equivalents often comes to light. General patterns might well appear in a larger sample, of course.

Plain legal language

In some instances, using a construction with the fact that is a simple and efficient way to get the message across. This is certainly the case in (11), where a series of NPs appear in object position and the proposition in the complement clause is conveniently added to the series; and a similar point can be made about the pair of NPs in subject position in (19). We have also noted instances like (15), where the writer apparently uses the word fact to mark the factual status of the proposition in the complement clause.

In other cases, the single-word counterparts of the construction involving the fact that provide cross-linguistic support for the argument that the construction can be unnecessarily cumbersome: examples (49–62) illustrate this clearly, and it would be perfectly possible to simplify (45–48) in similar ways, in both languages. The admirable guidelines from the EU translation unit, known in English as How to Write Clearly (European Commission 2012a), advise writers to avoid the expression in view of the fact that, and to use as instead. The German counterpart Klar und deutlich schreiben (European Commission 2012b) likewise rejects in Anbetracht des Umstands, dass (not attested in our corpus) in favour of weil. (The French Rédiger clairement (European Commission 2012c) advises comme rather than en raison du fait que, and the Italian Scrivere chiaro (European Commission 2012d) rejects in considerazione del fatto che in favour of poiché. I am not competent to check all the available language versions, but the Dutch and Spanish guidelines give similar advice, although the longer phrase in these two languages (i betragtning af at/habida cuenta de que) does not contain an equivalent of the word fact.)

We thus have some limited evidence that a contrastive, corpus-based approach can supplement efforts to simplify legal language.

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