Transius Symposium

"Corpus Analysis in Legal Research and Legal Translation Studies"

3 June 2016, University of Geneva

Programme | Pre-Symposium Seminar | Speakers Practical information 

The potential of corpus analysis as a methodology for researching legal language, legal translation and law is nowadays undeniable. However, the number of systematic, publicly available corpus studies in these fields is still limited. The creation and exploitation of corpora for specific research purposes entail addressing multiple methodological questions on the parameters for corpus building and corpus querying, as well as key decisions on the selection and adaptation of suitable tools.

In order to explore these issues, the interdisciplinary Transius Symposium on Corpus Analysis in Legal Research and Legal Translation Studies will bring together legal, translation and linguistic researchers working with different corpora in national and international contexts. They will discuss how to make corpus analysis more accessible and fruitful in applied research. The advantages and challenges of using different types of corpora ―monolingual or multilingual, comparable or parallel― and analytical methods will be examined from various interdisciplinary angles. Corpus-building criteria, query strategies and corpus analytical tools will be illustrated with practical examples.

This one-day symposium continues the Transius tradition of exchanging experiences and best practices. It is open to all interested audiences, including scholars, practitioners and students in the fields of Translation Studies, Law and Linguistics. The symposium will be preceded by an optional seminar on corpus querying and statistics for corpus linguistics led by Dr Aleksandar TRKLJA (University of Birmingham) on 2 June.

Programme


9.00-9.30: Registration

9.30: Opening

9.40-10.40

  • Łucja BIEL (Faculty of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw): "Designing and querying a corpus to study variation in legal discourse"
  • Aleksandar TRKLJA (University of Brimingham): "Formulaicity and superdiversity in legal texts"

10.40-11.10: Coffee break

11.10-12.40

  • Urška ŠADL & Yannis PANAGIS (iCourts, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhaguen): "Does precedent constrain the Court of Justice of the European Union?: A multidimensional study of case citations" (videoconference)
  • Fernando PRIETO RAMOS & Diego GUZMÁN (Transius, Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva): "Identifying translation patterns in institutional settings: a corpus-based analysis of terminological consistency and adequacy"
  • Annarita FELICI (Transius, Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva): "The Swiss and the Italian civil codes: A corpus-based perspective on German and Italian"

12.40-14.15: Lunch break

14.15-15.15

  • Stefan HÖFLER (Centre for Legislative Studies, Institute of Law, University of Zürich): "Assessing the quality of legislation by means of an automatically annotated corpus"
  • Andreas ABEGG (School of Management and Law, University of Applied Sciences, Zürich): "Changes in our understanding of the “State”: Empirical linguistics in legal theory and history"

15.15-15.45: Coffee break

15.45-16.45

  • Giorgina CERUTTI (Transius, Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva): "Corpora for legal translation: From do-it-yourself to do-it-together"
  • Samantha CAYRON (Transius, Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva): "Analysing terminology in legal corpora for certified translation in the field of probate law"

16.45: Closing

Pre-Symposium Seminar: Tools and Methods in Multilingual Corpus Studies


Instructor: Aleksandar TRKLJA (University of Birmingham)

2 June 2016, 2.30pm-5pm

The aim of this seminar is to introduce participants to basic principles and methods of corpus linguistics (CL) for the study of interdisciplinary issues in monolingual and multilingual contexts. It will be divided into three parts:

  1. CL methods and theories
  2. Corpus tools: overview of the most frequently used tools and hands-on activities
  3. Basics of statistical evaluation and descriptive statistics: overview and hands-on activities

Participants will be introduced to key CL notions such as collocations, colligations and lexical bundles, and to the use of computational tools for linguistic analysis of different kinds of corpora. They will be asked to install the corpus tools AntConc and TXM or to login to CQPweb in advance of the tutorial. Data for analysis will be provided by the instructor.

No previous knowledge or experience in statistics or computer programming is required. Given the strong emphasis on methodological aspects, this seminar is particularly recommended to PhD students and other researchers working with corpora.

Speakers


Andreas ABEGG is a “Doktor iuris” and “Privatdozent” at Freiburg University (Switzerland). He is Professor of Public Commercial Law at the ZHAW School of Management and Law, where he is director of the Centre for Public Commercial Law. He also teaches at the Law Faculty of Lucerne University and is Professor Juris at Lillehammer University in Norway.  Furthermore, Andreas Abegg is a partner at AM T Rechtsanwälte, advising clients and representing them in court, and specialising in contract law, labour law and administrative law. Andreas Abegg’s main academic interests are in the intersection of public law and private law and legal theory. He has recently finished a project supported by the Swiss National Foundation on empirical linguistics in legal theory and history. List of publications and selected publications in full text.

Dr habil. Łucja BIEL is an Associate Professor and Acting Head of the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Poland. She was a Visiting Lecturer on the MA in Legal Translation at City University London (2009-2014). She has been an English-Polish legal translator since 1997, an expert member of the Polish Association of Sworn and Specialized Translators (TEPIS) and an expert for the Polish Normalization Committee (PKN). She is Secretary General of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and deputy editor of the Journal of Specialised Translation. She holds an MA in Translation Studies (Jagiellonian University of Kraków), PhD in Linguistics (University of Gdańsk), Diploma in English and EU Law (University of Cambridge) and a School of American Law diploma (Chicago-Kent School of Law and University of Gdańsk). She has published over 40 papers on legal/EU translation, legal terminology, translator training and corpus linguistics, as well as the book Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law (Peter Lang, 2014).

Samantha CAYRON graduated in Translation and Interpreting in Mexico City in 1993. In 2001, she obtained her MA in Translation (with Spanish, French and English) at the University of Geneva’s ETI (currently FTI). She then began working as a freelance translator, specializing in legal translation. In 2006, she was appointed as a French-Spanish certified translator and interpreter for the Court of Appeal of Grenoble (France). From 2008 to 2014, she worked as a research and teaching assistant at the FTI’s Spanish Translation Unit. In 2015, she completed her PhD on the French-Spanish certified translation of notary public documents in the probate field. As a research associate of the Transius Centre, her work focuses on translation in judicial contexts, certified legal translation and comparative law. She also teaches legal translation at postgraduate level as main subject.

Giorgina CERUTTI BENÍTEZ holds a degree in Translation with a concentration in legal and certified translation from the Faculty of Law of the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and a Masters of Arts in Translation with a concentration in Translation Technologies from the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI) of the University of Geneva. She has worked as a freelance translator and interpreter since 2011, and has completed a terminology internship at the United Nations Office at Geneva, as well as a translation internship at the South Centre. She is a member of the European Society for Translation Studies, and currently works as an assistant and doctoral candidate at the Spanish Unit of the FTI’s Translation Department. Her working languages are English, French and Spanish.

Annarita FELICI is Associate Professor of Translation at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Geneva, as well as head of the Italian Unit since October 2014. In 2008 she completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at Royal Holloway, University of London with a thesis on the translation of norms in EU legal texts. Her fields of special interest include legal translation, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis in institutional settings and the application of corpus linguistics to translation and specialized languages. She was previously “Juniorprofessorin” of legal linguistics at the University of Cologne in Germany and spent over ten years in the UK lecturing translation, general linguistics and Italian as a foreign language. She has worked as a translator and as translation project manager in the area of linguistic validation.

Diego GUZMÁN studied French Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (FFyL-UNAM, 2010) and holds two Masters of Arts in Translation from the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI) of the University of Geneva with concentrations on Specialised Translation (2013) and Translation Studies (2014). He is a member of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and an associate member of the Swiss Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters Association (ASTTI). As a practitioner, he has worked as a freelance translator since 2007 and he completed internships at the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) and the South Centre translation services. Since 2012, he works as an assistant for Transius. He is currently conducting  a doctoral research under the supervision of professor Fernando PRIETO RAMOS and focused on the challenges of legal asymmetry in institutional translation.

Stefan HÖFLER is a research fellow with the Centre of Legislative Studies at the Institute of Law of the University of Zürich. He holds an MA in English Linguistics and Literature, Computational Linguistics and Computer Science from the University of Zürich, a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (UK) and a DAS in Law from the University of Bern.  While his earlier research was concerned with the cognitive underpinnings of the human language faculty, his more recent research has focused on semantic, pragmatic and discourse-related aspects of legal language, the process of legislative drafting and questions related to the understandability of statutes and ordinances. Besides his academic activities, he worked as a legal editor for the Swiss Federal Chancellery.

Yannis PANAGIS works as Data Specialist at iCourts Centre of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen’s Law Faculty. He is responsible for data extraction and analysis, and for constructing the iCourts' database of International Courts. Yannis holds a PhD in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece, where he studied Algorithms for Information Retrieval in Web Information Systems. His research interests span the areas of Network Analysis, Legal Informatics, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Software Engineering.

Fernando PRIETO RAMOS is Full Professor of Translation, director of the Centre for Legal and Institutional Translation Studies (Transius) and currently Dean at the University of Geneva's Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. With a background in both Translation and Law, his work focuses on legal and institutional translation, including interdisciplinary methodologies, international legal instruments and specialized terminology. He teaches legal translation at postgraduate level, and is advisory board member of a number of Translation Studies journals. Former member of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University, he has published widely on legal translation and discourse analysis, and has received several research and teaching awards, including a European Label Award for Innovative Methods in Language Teaching (European Commission, 2002), an International Geneva Award (Swiss Network for International Studies, 2014), and a Consolidator Grant (ERC-SNSF, 2015). He has also translated for several organizations since 1997, including five years as an in-house translator at the World Trade Organization (dispute settlement team).

Urška ŠADL is an assistant professor at iCourts Centre of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen’s Law Faculty. She holds a LL.M. degree in Legal Studies from the College of Europe in Bruges and a PhD degree from the University of Copenhagen. She was a visiting researcher at King's College, London, the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford and, most recently, a Michigan Grotius Research Scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her primary research interests include empirical studies of European courts, the theory and practice of judicial precedents, European citizenship, and topics in European constitutional law more generally. Her research appears, inter alia, in the European Law Journal, the European Law Review, the European Journal of Legal Studies and the European Constitutional Law Review. She is currently completing the project The atlas of legal evolution: The case of EU law, which is financed by The Danish Council for Independent Research and the Sapare Aude Research Talent grant. 

Aleksandar TRKLJA is a research fellow at the University of Birmingham. He has been working on the Law and Language at the Court of Justice of the European Union (LLECJ) project since November 2013. His role includes carrying out corpus and discourse analyses of EU jurisprudence and developing a theoretical explanation of relations between law and language in the EU legal order. He holds a PhD degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. More generally, his research interests lie in the application of corpus linguistics to discourse and lexico-grammatical studies of texts belonging to different registers, languages or multimodal systems. Prior to the LLECJ project, Aleksandar worked on a range of small-scale projects concerned with the linguistic investigation of professional and media communication. 

Practical information


Venue

The conference will take place at the Uni Mail building (40, Boulevard du Pont d'Arve. 1205 - Geneva).

Transport

An 80-minute courtesy transport ticket is offered at Cointrin airport, in the baggage claim area. Additionally, hotels provide with a free Geneva Transport Card for each day of the stay. To get to the Uni Mail building on public transport, please follow these indications:

From Cointrin Airport: Take any train at the airport's train station* and get off at Cornavin train station (first stop). Take the tramway line 15 towards "Palettes" until "Uni Mail" stop.

*All trains departing from Cointrin Airport's train station stop at Cornavin Train Station.

From Cornavin train station: Take the tramway line 15 towards "Palettes" until "Uni Mail" stop. [map]

For more information, please visit Geneva's public transportation system website (TPG).

Meals

All participants must make arrangements for their lunches at their own initiative.

Accommodation

Participants are responsible for booking their own accommodation and are therefore asked to CONTACT HOTELS DIRECTLY.

Visiting Geneva

The city of Geneva is home to a number of international organisations, some of which open their doors to visitors. These include the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) and the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). Moreover Geneva's museums offer a wide range of cultural activities. During summer, different activities are organised at the city's parks and on the shores of the Leman Lake.

For more information on what to do during your stay at Geneva, please visit Geneva's Tourism and Conventions website.