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Constructing Child Abuse: Legal Definitions Versus Lived Experiences
[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 09:30:00 UTC
This talk, which addresses the themes Language and law and Language as evidence, is based on a newly started PhD dissertation that will analyse how the experience of child abuse is conceived and renegociated by former victims. The notion of child abuse is intrinsically related to its consequences on the victims: according the World Health Organization, it "includes all types of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence and commercial or other exploitation, which results in actual or potential harm to the child's health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power". Far from being a stabilised category, it is a historically and socially situated phenomenon which depends on how children's rights and parental roles are considered. For instance, parental authority was redefined in the French Civil Code in 2019, now excluding physical and psychological violence. Since child abuse is not a stable category, taking into account the interplay between legal definitions of abuse and the victims' viewpoint may help with the characterisation of this reality: to what extent do the legal definitions of abuse coincide with the victims' personal experiences? Are legal definitions cited and/or commented on by the speakers? Using an argumentative and enunciative analysis, I will examine how the victims negociate the reality of their experience in discourse, and therefore how they question or provide evidence for its categorisation as child abuse. To do so, I will first investigate how abuse is defined by laws in several countries (including France), paying particular attention to the criteria which allow to penalise such parental behaviours; the World Health Organisation's definition will also be analysed in that it belongs to legal interdiscourse. Second, these definitions will be confronted to data produced by former victims of child abuse on an Instagram account, on forums related to child abuse, and in a therapeutic context.
Lagorgette, D. (2010). Présentation. Langage et société, 132(2), 5‑14. https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.132.0005 Renaut, L., Ascone, L., & Longhi, J. (2018). De la trace langagière à l'indice linguistique : Enjeux et précautions d'une linguistique forensique: Éla. Études de linguistique appliquée, N° 188(4), 423‑442. https://doi.org/10.3917/ela.188.0423
Communicating uncertainty in legal counselling for asylum seekers
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 09:30:00 UTC
Asylum seekers who go through the complex, legal-administrative procedure of applying for international protection in Belgium have reported feelings of uncertainty (Fedasil 2018). In this regard, the UN refugee agency has critqued how asylum lawyers fail to consistently provide asylum seekers with clear information about their procedural prospects (UNHCR 2019). My research project, based on linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork at asylum law firms resulting in 72 audio-recordings of legal consultations, aims to scrutinise this claim by investigating how legal information is communicated during counselling interactions between asylum lawyers and their clients (Jacobs 2022). The analysis reveals that lawyers often explicitly verbalise the way in which the legal framework as well as the procedure around asylum entails a level of uncertainty. Lawyers are thus providing clients with accurate information yet not with the type of information that offers clarity. In communicating the fact that there are little procedural guarantees (something which is backed by scholarly research that argues how asylum law is ever-changing and how institutional decision-making can be considered quite arbitrary – Gill & Good 2019), lawyers aim to be upfront yet empathetic. This discursively challenging balancing act takes the shape of hedged statements about procedural developments and meta-pragmatic framing of the unpredictable character of the asylum procedure. The communication of uncertainty also impacts the lawyer-client relation: the fact that lawyers acknowledge the limits of their own epistemic authority, renders the legal consultation into a democratic and collaborative discursive space. Fedasil (2018). Kwetsbare personen met specifieke opvangnoden. Gill, N., & Good, A. (2019). Asylum determination in Europe: Ethnographic perspectives. Springer Nature. Jacobs, M. (2022). Language, legal counselling and asylum: A linguistic ethnography of immigration law firms in Belgium. Ghent University Press. UNHCR (2019). Juridische Begeleiding van verzoekers om internationale Bescherming in België.
Creatively hateful verbal abuse in Lithuanian internet comments
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 09:30:00 UTC
By intentionally challenging social diversity and thus disrupting social cohesion, hate speech (HS) remains an issue that poses practical problems such as detecting, monitoring, reporting it, and deciding when it is legally punishable. Despite the current upsurge in research on HS, some questions remain unanswered, one of which concerns the optimal linguistic criteria indicative of HS. HS is generally defined as verbal aggression that (a) targets a specific social group (defined by law) and (2) is intentional. The target can be defined arguably more easily; however, determining intentionality is more intricate. One important linguistic feature of intentionality and thus a possible indicator of HS is lexical creativity, which manifests best in the use of neologisms (Vasilaki 2014:103; cf. Ruzaitė 2021). Hence, the aim of this study is to examine neologisms in Lithuanian internet comments and assess how much they are indicative of HS. The data consists of 10,662 online comments (totalling 284,226 tokens) posted in response to 24 news reports on controversial issues related to one of the possible target groups of HS as defined by Lithuanian law. To determine how much creativity relates to HS, the data includes neutral, offensive comments, and comments containing HS. The analysis addresses three research questions: (1) What is the distribution of neologisms in the three types of comments?; (2) What morphological, syntactic, and lexical resources are used to create novel forms?; and (3) What are the themes of creative name-calling? The analysis takes a primarily qualitative approach and applies the framework of pragmatics. It resorts to Vasilaki's (2014) and Culpeper's (2009) definitions of creativity and creative insults, and Martínez and Jus's (2013) perception of conventional and unconventional insults. To account for the themes of creative name-calling, Ljung's (2010: 35) categorization is applied. The preliminary results show that neologisms clearly dominate in offensive and hateful comments but are not characteristic of neutral ones. They often appear in vocatives as insults and are part of discriminatory referential strategies used to refer to vulnerable groups. The most common way of derivation used to coin novel forms is that of affixation, and predominantly Russian suffixes are used when creating derogatory terms. The dominating themes include the sex-organ and sexual activities theme, the animal theme, and the filth theme. References Culpeper, Jonathan. 2009. Impoliteness: Using and understanding the language of offence. ESRC project website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/impoliteness/. Ljung, Magnus. 2011. Swearing: A Cross-cultural Linguistic Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martínez, José Mateo and Yus, Francisco. 2013. Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy of insults. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1 (1), 87-114. Ruzaitė, Jūratė. (2021) How do haters hate? Verbal aggression in Lithuanian online comments. In I. Chiluwa (ed.), Discourse and Conflict: Analysing Text and Talk of Conflict, Hate and Peace-Building. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76485-2_5 Vasilaki, Maria. 2014. Name-calling in Greek YouTube comments. In Papers from the 9th Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching, ed. Carolina Pérez-Arredondo, Margarita Calderón-López, Hilda Hidalgo-Avilés, and David Pask-Hughes, 90–110. Lancaster: Lancaster University.
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 09:30:00 UTC
Forensic Linguistics and Language and Law – Julien Longhi & Nadia Makouar Gender in laws This presentation intends to discuss the ways in which laws of different countries address gender and the representations the reveal about gender roles in the societies they regulate. These information will more especially be examined in comparison with the reality of tensions, place and role problematics LGBTQ+ people meet in their everyday life, although there are antidiscrimination laws, and as far as specific laws exist to protect them and make sure they are treated in equality of rights. On the pragmatic side, laws appear to be more intentional than operational as reality of life for the concerned people is often very different from what laws generally say. The question then is the gap in between what laws are supposed to aim at and rule, and the social facts and interactions that rule every day's life. People's rights and their place in the society they live in, seems to depend on gendered representations, whatever the laws seem to enunciate. The focus will be directed on three different countries : France, England and India, and on the way some of their laws address more or less specifically the LGBTQ+ community place in society, and how this does or not affect their everyday life. More especially, France and England will be compared in terms of same sex couples marriage and families and their rights; India, will be examined as it has a third gender registered in its Constitution. The global problematic of gender and the law is here about the presupposed (intended) equality of rights for women and men, and how it meets the reality of their life. NB: this work is the result of a "Délégation CNRS" with field research in the 3 concerned countries, and based on 36 interviews + bibliography
Discourse analytical insights into the prioritization of forensic linguistics, language and law, and cyberviolence in Horizon Europe
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 09:30:00 UTC
This paper discusses how forensic linguistics, language and law, and cyberviolence are positioned in the world's largest research funding programme, Horizon Europe. This paper discusses how the European Union values these topics in research and innovation. This topic is highly relevant with the recent launch of the programme. Through language, people do things, influence others, and shape societies (Jones, 2012). With this discourse analytical approach, this paper studies the language used to communicate the European Union's values, goals, and expectations in the context of research funding. This paper examines mentions of forensic linguistics, language and law, and cyberviolence, closely analysing the language used, while also situating the topics into wider contexts and Discourses. In this paper, the value of interdisciplinary research in these topics is highlighted as well, as the work programmes emphasise notions such as the integration of social sciences and humanities into all actions (Puputti, 2022). In the reference documents, cyberviolence is discussed among other societal challenges. This paper analyses how the documents position and describe research relating to cybersecurity. The reference documents also discuss the importance of research that improves understanding of organizational cultures and of human interactions in the forensic context, for example through the creation of a common lexicon (European Commission, 2021, p. 56). This issue relates to the strengthening of the investigative process and improved communication. As the text states, "communication between practitioners within the same institute can introduce a bias as well. When exchanging the information cross-border, both organisational cultures and languages can also cause a bias" (2021, p. 55). The text further describes that "a critical enabler for an improved collaboration and communication between forensic practitioners is the use of a clear, consistent vocabulary" (p. 56). This paper closely analyzes how these topics are discussed, described, and positioned in Horizon Europe. In addition to forensic linguistics and cyberviolence, language and law are featured across topics and work programmes, and this paper examines the contexts in which they are discussed and how they are positioned. This paper contributes to the fields of cybersecurity and forensic and legal linguistics, while also providing crucial insight for researchers studying talk and interaction, communication, and institutional and organizational discourse.
References: European Commission. (2021). Horizon Europe Work Programme 2021-2022 6. Civil Security for Society (European Commission Decision C(2021)4200 of 15 June 2021). Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/wpcall/2021-2022/wp-6-civil-security-for-society_horizon-2021-2022_en.pdf Accessed July 9, 2022. Jones, R. (2012). Discourse analysis: A resource book for students. Routledge. Puputti, H. (2022). Positioning social sciences and humanities actors in the ninth European Union Framework Programme: a discourse analysis of Horizon Europe reference documents. [Master's thesis, University of Oulu]. Jultika http://jultika.oulu.fi/Record/nbnfioulu-202204191603
Presenters Heidi Puputti Doctoral Researcher, University Of Oulu
Me, Myself, and I: Challenges posed by Japanese forms of address in Japanese-English court interpreting
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics08:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 06:30:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 09:30:00 UTC
Court interpreters are frequently instructed to interpret "faithfully" or "literally" even though literature in interpreting and translation has been trying to debunk the myth of "literal translation" for decades now. Differences in expression between the source and text languages often make such translation impossible and undesirable, as it may lead to a meaning unintended by the source text author. Other factors, such as historical, social, or cultural background, may also be essential. On the other hand, the necessity of accuracy in court interpreting is indisputable, as insufficient accuracy would make court interpreting obsolete and have potentially severe consequences for the administration of justice.
Depending on their working languages, court interpreters may need to exercise their 'discretionary powers' (Laster and Taylor, 1994) to a more significant or lesser extent to ensure accuracy (rather than "literalness") of their rendition. Japanese forms of address are precisely where court interpreters need to demonstrate their skills to achieve equivalence beyond the superficial features of the text they are working with. This is because Japanese is a language rich in personal pronouns whose usage is informed by various idiosyncratic characteristics of both the speaker and the addressee, such as gender, age, or status in the social hierarchy or their position in the communication act. Further, as there is no 'you' in Japanese that could be considered neutral in terms of honorific value, various nouns can also act as personal pronouns, making rendition between English and Japanese (and vice versa) more challenging than if both the source and the target languages belonged to the Indo-European family.
This paper addresses how court interpreters in Japan deal with forms of address (including personal pronouns) when working with English in Japanese. Such strategies undertaken by interpreters will be demonstrated based on the presenter's observations in criminal trials at district courts throughout Japan, including Tokyo, Yokohama, Chiba, Nagoya, Osaka, and Naha. The findings will further the discussion on the issue of "literal translation" in interpreter-mediated criminal proceedings and the role of court interpreters.
References Hōsōkai (2011), Hōtei Tsūyaku Handobukku, Tōkyō, Hōsōkai. Huszcza, Romuald (2006), Honoryfikatywność, Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Inoue, Miyako (2003), Vicarious Language. Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, London, University of California Press. Laster, Kathy and Taylor, Veronica (1994), Interpreters and the Legal Process, Leichhardt, The Federation Press. Yonezawa, Yoko (2021), The Mysterious Address Tern anata 'you' in Japanese, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company. Obana, Yasuko (2020), Politeness, in: Henrich, Patrick and Ohara, Yumiko (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics, New York, Routledge, 248-263. Shimotani, Maki (2012), Shizen dawna ni okeru nininshō daimeishi 'anata' ni tsuite no ichikōsatsu-ninshiteki yūisei (epistemic primacy) wo fumaete, Papers in Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language 22, 63-96.
Presenters Jakub Marszalenko Senior Lecturer, Nagoya University Of Foreign Studies
A study of a specialised American police discourse genre: probable cause affidavits
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 14:15:00 UTC
Due to the multiple interactions between police forces (specialists) and other members of society (non-specialists), English for Police Purposes might intuitively appear less specialised (Petit 2010: §12) than Scientific English for instance. Nevertheless, English for Police Purposes can be considered to be a specialised variety of English located at the crossroad of forensic and legal languages, with specific linguistic (Philbin 1996; Poteet & Poteet 2000), discursive (Johnson et al. 1993; Gaines 2011; Rock 2017) and cultural (Fielding 1994; Reiner 2000; Cartron 2022 in press) characteristics that deserve to be studied in depth. Among the various methods that can be used to investigate specialised languages, genre analysis (Swales 1990: 24-27) provides an interesting insight into the specialisation of the discursive community and its practices, taking into account linguistic and extralinguistic features (Beacco 2004: 116; Bhatia 2017: 6). English for Police Purposes is characterised by a variety of genres, both spoken (police interviews, radio communications or court testimonies for example) and written (such as police reports, manuals or codes of ethics). This paper focuses on the analysis of a specialised American police discourse genre based on a corpus of 115 probable cause affidavits. A probable cause affidavit is a sworn statement made by American police officers to state that there is probable cause to believe the defendant has committed (or is committing) a criminal offense and that the facts support the claim to make an arrest, conduct a search or seize property (Crespo 2020: 1279-1280). After briefly presenting the theoretical and methodological framework on which this study is based, the presentation intends to show how police officers use specific linguistic, discursive and rhetorical strategies to serve a specialised purpose (Van der Yeught 2016: 61), which is to prove the existence of probable cause to the relevant legal authorities (police superior, district attorney, judge or other actors in the judicial process). Police officers use diverse discursive devices to inform but also – and perhaps more importantly – to convince their audience.
References Beacco, Jean-Claude. 2004. "Trois perspectives linguistiques sur la notion de genre discursif". Langages 1/153, 109–119.
Bhatia, Vijay K. 2017. Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Practice. New York: Routledge.
Cartron, Audrey. In press. "A Study of the Psycho-Social Functions of Humour in English for Police Purposes". In Isani, Shaeda & Michel Van der Yeught (eds.), ESP and Humour. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Crespo, Andrew Manuel. 2020. "Probable Cause Pluralism". The Yale Law Journal 129, 1276–1391.
Fielding, Nigel. 1994. "Cop canteen culture". In Newburn, Tim & Elizabeth A. Stanko (eds.), Just Boys Doing Business? Men, Masculinities and Crime. London: Routledge, 46–63.
Gaines, Philip. 2011. "The Multifunctionality of Discourse Operator Okay: Evidence from a Police Interview". Journal of Pragmatics, 43/14, 3291–3315.
Johnson, Edward, Mark Garner, Steve Hick & David Matthews. 1993. PoliceSpeak: Police Communications and Language and the Channel Tunnel – Report. Cambridge: PoliceSpeak Publications.
Petit, Michel. 2010. "Le discours spécialisé et le spécialisé du discours : repères pour l'analyse du discours en anglais de spécialité". E-rea 8/1. DOI: 10.4000/erea.1400
Philbin, Tom. 1996. Cop Speak: The Lingo of Law Enforcement and Crime. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Poteet, Lewis J. & Aaron C. Poteet. 2000. Cop Talk: A Dictionary of Police Slang. Lincoln: Writers Club Press.
Rock, Frances. 2017. "Recruiting Frontstage Entextualisation: Drafting, Artefactuality and Written-ness as Resources in Police-Witness Interviews". Text and Talk 37/4, 3–38.
Distinguishing fraudulent ads in online illicit markets with forensic linguistic
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 14:15:00 UTC
Online fraud has long been an issue of concern to forensic scientists, particularly in terms of detection of fraudulent ads. Indeed, detecting a fraudulent ad is not always obvious, especially when the victims themselves do not realise that they are victims of a fraud (Rossy and Ribaux, 2020). However, when these are detected, it becomes interesting to approach them from a forensic intelligence perspective in order to detect crime series. The detection of links between cases is based on traces of different nature (Ribaux et al., 2022). The objective of this paper is to determine whether it is possible to detect links between fraudulent ads using the textual data available, through the language trace (Renaut et al., 2017) and a methodology derived from forensic linguistics. This is a field of research involving statistical analysis of textual data or style analysis for various purposes in a judicial context, including author recognition. These approaches can be used to identify author-specific features, which can be assimilated to language "traces" that can be used in different contexts, such as authorship analysis or the detection of similarities between two texts. To understand the issues faced by specialists in fraud detection, a preliminary study is made through interviews with online crime analysts. Since online frauds may happen in both legal and illegal online markets, data from three Dark Web cryptomarkets are analysed: Empire Market (data collected from April 2020 to August 2020), White House Market (data collected from April 2020 to March 2021), and Darkmarket (data collected from July 2020 to June 2021). By hypotheses, they indeed allow distinguishing frauds through the feedback left by buyers. The textual data from the ad description and the texts present in the ads evaluations are analysed. The first step consists of distinguishing legitimate ads from fraudulent ads based on feedback. Then, we detect patterns in the ads and infer links between the fraudulent ads. A non-exhaustive list of linguistic characteristics common to fraudulent ads is then formalised.
Renaut L, Ascone L and Longhi J (2017) De la trace langagière à l'indice linguistique : enjeux et précautions d'une linguistique forensique. Ela. Études de linguistique appliquée (188): 423–442. Ribaux O, Baechler S and Rossy Q (2022) Forensic Intelligence and Traceology in Digitalised Environments: The Detection and Analysis of Crime Patterns to Inform Practice. In: Gill M (ed.) The Handbook of Security. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 81–99. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-91735-7_5. Rossy Q and Ribaux O (2020) Orienting the Development of Crime Analysis Processes in Police Organisations Covering the Digital Transformations of Fraud Mechanisms. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 26(3): 335–356. DOI: 10.1007/s10610-020-09438-3.
Using keystroke logging to explore differences in written language production processes between self-experienced and invented narrative accounts: A forensic linguistic approach
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 14:15:00 UTC
This study aims at investigating if/how writing processes, such as planning and revision, differ between accounts of self-experienced and invented narratives. The underlying assumption is that cognitive load will increase for the writer when s/he is is changing or inventing parts of an otherwise self-experienced series of events. This builds on theories of how limited working memory capacity leads to increased pausing behavior in accordance with increased cognitive demands (Kellogg, 1996; McCutchen 2000), and that the need for revisions will increase when the writer wants to meet the goal of convincing the reader that something is true (cf. the relation between planning, translating and revision described in e.g. the writing model of Hayes and Flower, 1980). This presentation primarily focusses on comparing written accounts, collected with an experimental design. Participants (n=45) were presented with 4 elicitation videos, depicting misdemeanors (e.g., cheating on an exam, stealing a bike). Each participant performed 4 accounts across the 4 films: two written, and two spoken. For one account in each modality the participant is asked to lie and alter "who did it". Modality, films and invented/self-experienced accounts are balanced for order. The written data was collected online through keystroke logging (ScriptLog). The participants repeated the experiment 4 times with 2 weeks apart, to allow for comparisons of consecutive accounts of both invented and self-experienced narratives. The first results showed no differences between time on task between invented and self-experienced narratives, but the invented narratives required overall more pause time. In addition, time on task and overall pause time decreased over the consecutive accounts, indicating that the retelling task became easier independent of condition. There were no overall differences in the amounts of deleted text between the conditions, but during the writing of the invented narratives, less characters were written between pauses, indicating the need to pause (and plan?) more often. The general picture is that there are many individual differences, and that individual baselines may need to be established, as well as including comparisons within subjects in the further explorations of the data. Continuing analyses will look more closer at the linguistic contexts where the writers need to pause and revise, and will also compare the written accounts to spoken equivalents. The overall picture is however that using keystroke logging to investigate "true" and "false" narratives may be a rewarding avenue for forensic linguistics, and could be used (in addition to other tools) to identify instances where information needs to be further investigated. Hayes, J. R. & Flower, L. (1980). Identifying the organisation of the writing process. In Gregg, L. & Steinberg, E., (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing, pp 3–30. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. Kellogg, R. T. (1996). A model of working memory in writing. In Levy, C. M. & Ransdell, S., (Eds.), The Science of writing: Theories, methods, individual differences and applications. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McCutchen, D. (2000). Knowledge, processing and working memory. Educational Psychologist, 35(1):13–23.
Presenters Kajsa Gullberg Doctoral Student, Lund University Co-authors
“Was ist, wenn die Ausschreibung tschari geht?” Linguistic findings from Carabinieri investigations in a multilingual setting (German, Italian, Dialect)
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 14:15:00 UTC
In spring 2022, a political scandal shakes the Autonomous Province of Bolzano in Italy (in short: South Tyrol) and leads to a government crisis that will also affect the upcoming provincial elections in autumn 2023. In addition, further court proceedings in this cause are to be expected. This case is unusual and relevant from a linguistic-forensic perspective for several reasons: South Tyrol is one of the few regions in Europe with constitutionally enshrined bilingualism. Italian and German are regional official languages and are thus also used in court and all public institutions. Moreover, this scandal is based on a "data leak". More than 6,000 pages of police investigation and court files as well as more than 500 hours of telephone recordings, surveillance reports and WhatsApp chat histories were anonymously leaked to two local journalists (Franceschini & Oberhofer: 2021: 11f). The reason for the undercover investigations by the Carabinieri is the suspicion of irregularities in the awarding of public contracts in local public transport worth about one billion euros (ibid.: 158). In addition to the criminally relevant statements, however, the analysis of the meaning of incriminated statements is particularly relevant (Fobbe: 271). Although legally difficult to grasp, these statements are perceived as unacceptable in the public discussion and lead to resignations of political exponents. The corpus "Friends in the Edelweiss" (Edelweiss is an allusion to the party emblem of the governing party "South Tyrolean People's Party" SVP), excerpts of which are publicly accessible, is of outstanding interest from a linguistic point of view, as it allows us to trace the peculiarities of oral and written language use in South Tyrol through discourse analysis. Based on reconstructive-hermeneutic analysis, the constant alternation between standard Italian (= official language of the summary written protocols), standard German and the mix of regional dialect interspersed with Italianisms will be described. This code-switching has a very special function in South Tyrolean discourses, which can be considered exemplary for multilingual settings. (Risse 2013). The latter serves to disguise and camouflage, which in turn complicates the presentation of evidence in legal as well as political terms. It will be shown to what extent approaches of forensic linguistics in combination with discourse-analytical methods can serve to clarify political scandals and probably legally relevant details. Conversely, this contribution is also intended as an impulse to the forensic linguistics to expand its field of work from focusing on purely legally relevant issues to the area of political communication. References: Fobbe, E. (2017) : Forensische Linguistik. In : Handbuch Sprache im Recht, ed. by E. Felder & F. Vogel, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter pp. 271-289Franceschini, C. & /Oberhofer, A. (2022): Freunde im Edelweiss. Ein Sittenbild der Südtiroler Politik. BozenRisse, S. (2013): Sieg und Frieden. Zum sprachlichen und politischen Handeln in Südtirol/Sudtirolo/Alto Adige. München: iudiciumFootnote: Was ist, wenn die Ausschreibung tschari geht? – What if the tender goes down the drain? « Tschari » is a typical expression of South Tyrolean German, hardly to understand even for native German speakers.
Presenters Stephanie Risse Prof. Associata, Free University Of Bolzano
The right to translation in criminal proceedings: the case of the criminal court in Ghent
Oral Presentation[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 14:15:00 UTC
Every year, Belgian authorities spend a considerable budget on translations in criminal proceedings. These translations not only facilitate cooperation between European judicial services, but also enable communication between Belgian judicial services and foreign-language parties. For certain foreign-language parties, the right to translation has been established by EU law: Directives 2012/29/EU and 2010/64/EU guarantee a free translation of essential documents for victims and accused persons. The transposition of these directives, however, proved to be difficult: Belgium did not meet the foreseen deadline (2013) and only transposed the directives in 2016 (European Commission, 2018). This contribution reports on the results of an ethnographic research project, the aim of which is to investigate how the Belgian courts put the right to translation into practice. I analyzed 245 criminal files in which the Dutch-speaking correctional court in Ghent ordered translations between 2018 and 2021. In addition, I conducted interviews with magistrates and court staff. My analyses show, first of all, that more than 70% of the collected texts are translations from a foreign language into Dutch and are intended for the court. This predominance of translations for the court can be explained by the strict unilingual nature of the criminal procedure (Dejemeppe, 2011; Vanden Bosch, 2017). However, the relatively small volume of translations into foreign languages also implies that suspects and victims often do not (or cannot?) make use of their right to translation. Secondly, I could establish that the Ghent police frequently replace interrogations with the assistance of an interpreter (as stipulated in Directive 2010/64/EU and national legislation) by forms on which non-Dutch speaking suspects, witnesses and victims write down their statement in a language of their choice (often not their mother tongue, but a lingua franca). This practice raises questions about literacy (is everyone capable of writing down a statement?) and equality (is it fair to replace an interrogation with a half-page handwritten account?) (Engelen, 1999; Bambust, 2016). These findings suggest that, even though Belgian authorities have transposed the EU directives, the current system does not always succeed in guaranteeing the fairness of the proceedings.
Bambust, I. (2016) 'Een taalkronkel in het Belgische politieverhoor', De Taalsector. Dejemeppe, B. (2011) 'L'emploi des langues en matière pénale. Réponses à douze questions ordinaires', in La langue du procès. Antwerpen: Intersentia, pp. 49–64. Engelen, J. (1999) 'Het politieverhoor na Franchimont', De orde van de dag, (5), pp. 43–54. European Commission (2018). Report on the implementation of Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 October 2010 on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings. European Parliament and Council directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings (2010) Official Journal, L280. European Parliament and Council directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime, and replacing Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA (2012) Official Journal, L315/57. Vanden Bosch, Y. (2017) 'Het recht op vertolking en vertaling in strafzaken & de omzetting van de EU-richtlijnen', Tijdschrift voor Strafrecht, (2), pp. 79–107.
Is Plain legal French actually Plain? A textometric comparison of French-Canadian and ‘French’ French legal dissemination texts, focusing on discourse patterns of phraseology
[SYMP46] Forensic and legal linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 14:15:00 UTC
The dissemination of legal knowledge is a critical issue for equal access to law and justice. Legal discourse has been justly criticized for its obscure terminology and convoluted phrasing, which has notably led to the Plain Language Movement in English-speaking countries. In Canada, the concept of Plain Language has been applied to French since the 1980s due to the official bilingualism policy, while the concept has only been recently discussed in France.
In this paper we examine the impact of plain language rewriting on legal phraseology in French dissemination contexts. The first aim of our study is to see if plain texts published in France contain more traces of legal phraseology than French Canadian texts, which have been implementing Plain Language guidelines for years. Our second objective is to determine if a 'phraseology of plain language' can be identified across genres and languages, and whether it is in accordance with plain language guidelines.
To do this, we compare and contrast two corpora of expert-to-expert legal texts written in French, made up respectively of legislative texts published in France (4M words) and judicial texts published by the Supreme Court of Canada (700 000 words), with their expert-to-non-expert counterparts, i.e. two corpora of texts that are claimed to be written in plain French language for a non-expert readership published online by legal institutions: texts that guide laypersons through legal and administrative processes in France (870 000 words) and summaries of decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada (70 000 words).
Using ngrams and textometric methods, we extract and discuss the patterns that emerge from the corpora. In particular, our analyses rely on the concept of 'lexico-grammatical pattern', defined as a more-or-less fixed, recurring sequence of lexical and grammatical items. For instance, the followingpassive sequence [Person] a été accusé de [crime/offense] is used to introduce a case and to topicalize human referents. We identify the recurring lexico-grammatical patterns and their discursive functions.
References:
ASPREY, Michèle M. Plain language around the world. Language: Introductory readings, 2010.
GLEDHILL, Christopher, PATIN, Stéphane, et ZIMINA, Maria. Lexico-grammaire et textométrie : identification et visualisation de schémas lexico-grammaticaux caractéristiques dans deux corpus juridiques comparables en français. Corpus, 2017, no 17.
GOŹDŹ-ROSZKOWSKI, Stanislaw et PONTRANDOLFO, Gianluca (ed.). Phraseology in legal and institutional settings: a corpus-based interdisciplinary perspective. Routledge, 2017.
TURNBULL, Judith. Communicating and recontextualizing legal advice online in English. Popularization and knowledge mediation in the legal field. LIT Verlag, Münster, 2018, p. 201-222.
Heidi Puputti
Jakub Marszalenko
Audrey CARTRON
Julien Longhi
Kajsa Gullberg
Stephanie Risse
Christopher Gledhill
