Materials and methods

The main research objectives are to be achieved by means of providing answers to a range of auxiliary questions based on the analysis of genres deemed representative of contemporary legal discourse, namely:

(1) legal acts (statutes, regulations, directives), and

(2) case-law (judgments, orders, opinions).

The project provides for the creation of a multilingual genre-based corpus representative of legal discourse at the national and supranational levels and an exhaustive list of legal Latinisms which will be fed into corpus software. The interdisciplinary analyses to be carried out within the framework of the research project will be embedded in jurilinguistics, combining the knowledge and methodology of linguistics and legal sciences. The broad-scale studies on large-scale comparable corpora will delve into the intra- and intergeneric as well as intra- and inter-systemic variation as regards the synchronic and micro-diachronic employment of legal Latin from a quantitative perspective. On the other hand, small-scale parallel corpora of translated texts available in at least two languages (primarily English and Polish) will enable qualitative linguistic, legal and translational analyses of Latinisms.

The research project will broaden the scope of existing scarce and fragmentary research on legal Latin in legal discourse, which so far has been conducted on small-scale corpora. The knowledge gained in the course of the project will be useful to both lawyers and non-lawyers, including translators who rarely possess formal legal education apart from linguistic competences. The results will allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the degree of prevalence of legal Latin in legal discourse, changes in its usage, and its possible impact on the accessibility of legal texts. In addition, the research tasks will make it possible to define the role played by today’s legal Latin and the implications for the training of translators of legal texts and lawyers. The project may contribute to the advancement of the field of jurilinguistics by better describing the role of Latin in contemporary legal discourse and potentially set ground for creating guidelines for the translation of Latinisms and their variants thanks to the development of a comprehensive resource in the form of a glossary of legal Latin salient in the national and supranational contexts.