Legal English

Most people have heard of a notary public. Fewer people could tell you exactly what one does-and even fewer understand how notary public involvement in translation differs from standard certified translation. It's one of those distinctions that only becomes important when it matters. And when it matters, it usually matters a lot.

A clear delineation is obvious to understand specific aspects regarding the use of academic writing in health care. Thus, more pragmatic and less general aspects of academic writing for medical purposes will be taken into account. Due to solid experience in students’ education of LSP at medical faculties, we are delighted to share our academic experience primarily with students as well as with our colleagues. The paper will be focused on emphasizing the critical points of structuring medical texts. Namely, it will present the path of text structuring to help readers understand the specific aspects of high relevance for medical authors. Also, it will draw attention to the role of health care practitioners as well as how they should evaluate this aspect in their professional communication. Furthermore, we would like to pay attention to approaching fundamental problems in academic writing in health care.

This annual research update to The Foundations and Processes of Clear Communication synthesizes 2025 work on accessibility standards, literacy and law, cognitive science, and AI to strengthen the case for plain language as both an ethical obligation and an accessibility requirement. It revisits each major chapter of the original book with new evidence on digital reading, cognitive load, repetition, SCARF-based social needs, and user testing, and clarifies where AI can assist (drafting options, restructuring) versus where human judgment remains essential (defining communication needs, ethics, accessibility, and validation with real users)

The exponential increase in the media consumption of South Asia on international digital platforms has led to a critical need to understand the linguistic mechanisms that are indicative of cross-cultural transmission of narratives. In response to this, this study is a comprehensive Multi-Dimensional (MD) Analysis of the English subtitles of the Pakistani Urdu Drama, Aas Paas (2025). The aim is to outline the lexico-grammatical profile of this particular audiovisual translation register. A Python-based corpus analysis tool was used to create a corpus of 148,288 words consisting of the 32-episode files, then computational feature extraction and factor analysis were used. Drawing upon Biber's (1988) seminal framework for register variation, the research identifies five functional dimensions of variation in the subtitle corpus: (1) syntactic complexity versus simplified orality; (2) informational density versus interactive inquiry; (3) stylistic elaboration versus fragmented coordination; (4) descriptive density; and (5) lexical sophistication. The results expose a "hybrid register" that structurally imitates the syntactic density of written fiction but pragmatically retains the interactive volatility of face-to-face conversation. Specifically, the analysis reveals a high level of nominalisation and verbal complexity in segments with narrative-heavy style-probably an artefact of explicating the translation-and pronounheavy, fragmented discourse in scenes of conflict between Pakistanis, in line with Pakistani English norms. By plotting these dimensions against the story's development of the drama, the research shows how linguistic variation is a proxy for thematic changes between the professional and domestic spheres that are intrinsic to the plot. The research is essential to corpus linguistics, translation studies, and South Asian media studies, as it provides a quantitative multidimensional profile of the Urdu-English subtitles register.

Construction contracts play a central role in organising project delivery by allocating risk, defining responsibilities, and structuring decision-making processes. Despite this importance, many standardform construction contracts remain linguistically dense and structurally fragmented, creating barriers to comprehension and effective administration. These features can undermine contractual certainty and contribute to disputes, particularly where non-lawyers are required to operate the contract on a day-today basis. This paper examines the relationship between drafting style, contractual structure, and administrative usability through a doctrinal and functional analysis of selected standard-form construction contracts. Using a comparative approach, the study evaluates how plain-language drafting techniques-while retaining necessary legal terms of art-can improve clarity without compromising legal precision or enforceability. The analysis focuses on clause structure, sequencing, cross-referencing, and the articulation of rights and obligations, with particular attention to mechanisms governing time, payment, variations, and dispute resolution. The findings suggest that contracts drafted using modern plain-language principles exhibit greater internal coherence and administrative usability, reducing the likelihood of misunderstanding and procedural error. The paper argues that plain-language drafting should be understood not merely as a stylistic preference, but as a substantive design choice that supports effective contract administration. The study contributes to discussions on modernising construction contracts and provides a doctrinal foundation for further research into usability-focused contract reform.

Machine translation (MT) has made huge strides in the last decades and it is increasingly applied in the ESL classroom, both for language learning and translation purposes. This paper wishes to explore whether and to what extent automatic translations performed by an MT platform and a Language Model (LM) tool can be effectively integrated and/or post-edited by corpus evidence. The language pair considered for the analysis is Italian/English, and the source text is an abstract focusing on academic Italian as an L2. The corpus consulted is the ARC (Anthology Reference Corpus), available on Sketch Engine. In this case, the Italian abstract is accompanied by an official translation into English. Therefore, this paper compares MT-and LM-driven output with the official target text. Additionally, it investigates to what extent corpus consultation can be integrated into the post-editing process to produce a qualitatively acceptable text in the target language. The paper's findings indicate the high reliability of corpus-driven post-editing, revealing alternative translation options. It also brings collocations to the fore, thereby foregrounding language patterns. In addition, corpus analysis helps address MT-and LM-driven shortcomings. The paper discusses how corpus-driven post-editing can be seamlessly incorporated into the translation process and into translation and language education.

This research confronts the stark reality that English, far from being just a language, acts as a gatekeeper in India's legal system. It studies the role of English proficiency with respect to lawyers and clients across various levels of the Indian judicial system, while also examining its broader implications on justice delivery and the functioning of democracy in India. It primarily investigates two groups that suffer under this linguistic dominance: (1) law students and lawyers from vernacular educational backgrounds, and (2) clients who cannot navigate the English-driven legal process. However, it also examines its broader implications on justice delivery and the functioning of democracy in India. With over 4.7 crore pending cases in Indian courts (Pti), delayed justice often erodes public faith in the system. The study also addresses how these delays, compounded by linguistic obstacles, contribute to the perception of judicial inefficiency and undermine democratic values. For lawyers, English proficiency is often a make-or-break factor for career advancement, courtroom performance, and professional credibility. Those who lack fluency in English struggle to compete, regardless of their legal acumen. This creates a two-tiered system where English-speaking lawyers are privileged over their vernacular peers. For clients, the consequences are even more troubling. Non-Englishspeaking individuals find themselves lost in a system that communicates, records, and argues in English. Legal documents, court proceedings, and lawyer-client interactions become hurdles rather than steps toward justice. The question at the core of this study is clear: Is English more than just a medium of communication in India's legal profession? Does being a non-English speaker deny individuals access to the privileges enjoyed by those who are fluent in the language? This research will examine the lived experiences of both lawyers and clients who face these linguistic barriers. The study aims to expose the hidden role of language in creating privilege and will propose actionable steps to make legal proceedings more accessible to all, regardless of language.

Abstract: Tutors in problem-based learning (PBL) lead, monitor and indirectly stimulate students in collaborative learning without prescribing instruction. Their aim is to moderate and facilitate the cognitive processes in learning through probing questions that stimulate deeper analysis of subject matter and reasoning skills in learners. A problembased scenario in an unfamiliar foreign language learning environment, however, may lead to cognitive overload. This research reports findings following the use of PBL in an English for specific purposes (ESP) undergraduate linguistics course as a way to prepare students for a teaching career requiring job/teaching-specific English skills for different disciplines. PBL was effective in increasing student achievement scores, and in synthesizing their ESP linguistic and intellectual skills into cohesive representation of their academic interests. PBL was not as effective in increasing student self efficacy, and students were at developed sta...

Emotional intelligence in educational leadership has become widely recognised as critical in determining effectiveness and influencing decision-making and communication strategies. The article presents a study on emotional intelligence development in students by implementing specific exercises and sociocultural materials in English lessons. The experimental study was conducted at the Multidisciplinary College. The study was undertaken from September 2023 to April 2024. The sample involved 25 third-year students from the experimental group and 24 third-year students from the control group, all majoring in "foreign language teaching". Theoretical methods included the analysis and synthesis of academic and methodological literature related to the research topic, with particular attention given to the seminal works on emotional intelligence by J. Mayer, P. Salovey, D. Caruso, D. Goleman, and R. BarOn. Empirical research methods included a pedagogical experiment with analytical and statistical processing of data on the level of emotional intelligence before introducing a set of exercises and sociocultural materials into the educational process and at the end of the experiment. The theoretical significance of the research enhances the academic understanding of emotional intelligence and its application in language education. The practical importance of the work is that the proposed set of exercises and sociocultural materials opens up prospects for its application among English language teachers. The study findings can contribute to the modernisation of the educational process aimed at the comprehensive development of students in the context of modern language education.

This paper wishes to explore whether and to what extent the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus, Rossini Favretti et al. ) can be helpful in the translation of contract clauses. To this aim, a severability clause is translated from Italian into English by consulting a dictionary, the English sub-section of the BoLC, and online contract databases via web advanced searches. The search techniques and language queries carried out are described rigorously to allow for the full replication of the corpus analysis process in translator training. The paper findings highlight that the BoLC can be rather challenging when addressing sui generis contract formulae. Nonetheless, it is a reliable translation tool, especially if integrated with contract-specific language resources, such as online contract databases. Hence, the paper sheds light on how to source and assess translation options via corpus consultation and targeted web searches. The paper also discusses the shifted role of lecturers once users become acquainted with the new search tools. In particular, lessons become more student-centred.

Статья раскрывает опыт создания электронных обучающих пособий по татарскому языку специалистами Института прикладной семиотики АН РТ. Более подробно рассматриваются цели и принципы создания мультимедийного интерактивного Интернет-учебника «Татар теле онлайн», описывается структура, содержание и другие аспекты его разработки и практического использования. Учебный материал снабжен интерактивными упражнениями различного типа, с помощью которых вырабатываются основные умения и навыки. Описывается перспектива развития образовательных ресурсов в области татарского языка. The article reveals the creation experience of Tatar electronic educational textbooks by specialists from the Institute of Applied Semiotics of Tatarstan Academy of Science. The objectives and principles of creation of the Tatar Tele On-line multimedia interactive textbook are considered more closely, the structure, the content and other aspects of its development and practical use are described. Educational material is provided with interactive exercises of various types which develop basic knowledge and skills. The development prospect of educational resources in the Tatar language sphere is described. информационные технологии, мультимедийный онлайн-учебник, татарский язык, образовательные ресурсы, электронный учебник, интерактивные упражнения information technology, the Tatar language, educational resources, electronic textbooks, interactive exercises

Habida cuenta del gran impacto que ejercen las plataformas colaborativas en el mercado turístico, este trabajo persigue ofrecer una traducción intralingüística diafásica de las Terms of Service de Airbnb, según el Plain Language movement, para facilitar su comprensión a los usuarios viajeros. En concreto, el presente artículo se centra en la simplificación de tres rasgos léxicos multipalabra: los verbos frasales, las preposiciones complejas, y los binomios y los trinomios sinónimos o cuasisinónimos y de extrema especificidad. La extracción automática de datos se llevó a cabo a partir del tipo de consulta CQL y la función "N-gramas" de Sketch Engine, lo cual se complementó con un cribado manual. En total, se analizaron y simplificaron 64 elementos, entre los que predominaban las preposiciones complejas. La estrategia de Plain English más recurrente fue la sustitución de expresiones multipalabra por unidades monopalabra de la lengua estándar.

Machine and AI-driven translations have become widespread in the medical field as they help remove language barriers between physicians and patients. However, the literature has warned against the many pitfalls of automated renditions, and has highlighted the need for human intervention to guarantee accuracy. This paper is aimed at exploring the quality of the AI-driven and machine translation (from Italian into English) of an online popularised article addressing Parkinson’s disease (PD) in light of comparable corpus analysis. To this end, the AI-driven Notebook LM platform and the DeepL machine translation solution are used. In addition, a corpus of 10,000 articles dealing with PD is composed and consulted. The paper findings report that the automated translations are characterised by issues encompassing word choices, pre- and post- modification, collocational and colligational usages. Therefore, automated target texts can be considered acceptable when applied in a physician-patient context given that essential communi- cative functions must be prioritised. In more formal settings, conversely, human translation aided by comparable corpora, or automatic translation post-edited by corpus consultation, are more reliable.

The article discusses the results of and the rationale behind a needs analysis survey carried out among students and recent graduates with the aim of modifying and innovating an existing course syllabus. It documents the preparation of the changes in the Legal English syllabus at the Faculty of Law as part of Impact project implemented at the MU Language Centre. The findings from the questionnaire surveys are contrasted with the language requirements that major law firms place on their recruits. The paper proposes some ways of including changes in the new syllabus of legal English for undergraduates. The preparation of the new syllabus aims to make the course as relevant as possible to the CEFRL and the future language needs of law students.

As soft skills have become a desirable part of university training, we introduced the development of such skills into the classes of legal English. The workshop presents a way of improving the students’ oral competence; its content is based on materials used in the regular classes of English for Lawyers and the intensive course of Communication Skills in Legal English taught as part of the series Soft Skills in Foreign Languages (within the COMPACT project) at Masaryk University in Brno. The workshop includes three phases of developing the skills: preparation, practice and self-reflection. This structure can be easily adopted to various other professional settings.

This article deals with mediation in language teaching, focusing on how the practice of mediation – as a specific language skill – can be incorporated in the syllabus. The chapter defines the skill of mediation as an emerging concept in language education, and discusses its potential for effective teaching of English for Specific Purposes in general and English for Legal Purposes in particular. The first part of the text seeks to answer several questions, aiming to determine whether mediation is relevant in the context of legal practice and whether it has a place in an English for Law syllabus. The second part addresses a more practical concern of how the skill of mediation can be practiced by students. The article makes a case for assigning mediation a much more central place in the classroom, giving a number of specific examples of how this soft skill can be developed in the teaching of ESP and ELP.

The Abridged Law Dictionary 2026 is a specialized bilingual reference work designed for Arabic-speaking legal practitioners, scholars, and students who engage with English and Latin legal terminology. It presents a carefully curated collection of the most widely used terms in international arbitration, comparative law, and transnational litigation, offering precise and accessible definitions without confining itself to the legal vocabulary of any single jurisdiction. The dictionary aims to bridge the linguistic and conceptual gap that often arises when Arabic users consult English-language judgments, arbitral awards, academic works, and legal frameworks, thereby facilitating clearer understanding and more accurate legal drafting. The work reflects the extensive practical and academic experience of its author, Counsellor Dr. Asser Mahmoud Harb, whose background in State Lawsuits Authority, international cooperation, and legal translation informs the clarity and doctrinal accuracy of the entries. Now in its third edition (2026), the dictionary integrates modern terminology used in global dispute resolution forums while preserving essential classical Latin maxims. It stands as a compact yet comprehensive tool for enhancing legal proficiency, improving comparative legal analysis, and supporting practitioners who navigate bilingual legal environments.

The study of the role of artifi cial intelligence in activating the linguistic experience of students of non-language universities in English classes
is a contemporary topic for modern higher education. Using the variability
of digital technologies in the process of teaching English to students of nonlinguistic universities provides new approaches to the educational process.
The article considers the results of the application of artifi cial intelligence for
legal specialties in teaching English to undergraduate students. Tasks created with the help of modern technologies provide an opportunity to model a
foreign-language environment to activate students’ linguistic experience, develop intercultural communication, as well as form knowledge in the foreignlanguage professional sphere. The result of research on the application of
the developed tasks is to improve the quality of education in the fi eld of foreign language, increase motivation and apply information in the professional
sphere at an international level. The use of artifi cial intelligence tools allows
modeling the linguistic experience of students in the professional sphere, using English as another competence of a specialist in the fi eld of jurisprudence.
Keywords: Artifi cial intelligence, English for special purposes, higher education, non-linguistic university, legal specialties, linguistic experience, pedagogical modeling

The article deals with typical mistakes made by engineering students translating technical texts. The study was performed within the framework of the “Foreign language” course for students of Oil and Gas Business faculty. The analysis was provided for the texts translated by the engineering students in oil and gas industry. The study covered 40 students (I-II courses) at the Branch of IUT in Surgut. The author focuses on the main mistakes: translation difficulties caused by the structural features of the English sentence; difficulties of translation due to the characteristics of the part of speech; lexical difficulties and describes every type of mistakes in students’ translations. This study is considered to be relevant as its outcomes can be applied during developing and planning the course "Foreign Language" for engineering students.El artículo trata sobre los errores típicos cometidos por estudiantes de ingeniería que traducen textos técnicos. El estudio se realizó en ...

The present article investigates a particular lay-oriented medico-pharmaceutical genre, viz. the European Public Assessment Report-summary for the public, which is a summarized version of a much longer specialized report published by the European Medicines Agency. The specialized report sets out the results of the Agency's evaluation of a given pharmaceutical company's application for marketing authorization of a medicinal product in EU countries. The summary for the public reports the gist of the specialized source text in a linguistic register suitable for a lay readership. However, while the summaries are thus products of registerial adaptation, it is uncertain whether the rewriting results in texts that are sufficiently coherent, given that the key features of summary writing-condensation and selection of information-may be at odds with the production of coherent text. Therefore, based on an analytical methodology originating in Systemic-Functional Linguistics, this article investigates a small corpus of EPAR summaries to assess the level of coherence in these rewritten texts. The investigation uncovers the ways and the extent to which the summaries employ structural and non-structural cohesive devices to achieve coherence. It is concluded, however, that while the use of these devices in the texts is such as to create a clear potential for coherence, this potential is not adequately exploited, which means that the level of coherence in the texts leaves something to be desired.

In the tradition of ESP genre analysis, there is a paucity of legal genre analyses that focused on exploring the expert perspectives on genre organization to raise learners' rhetorical consciousness of the necessary discursive practices. Therefore, this study analyzed interview data on the genre organization of a legal letters of demand collected from 10 lawyers. The Grounded Theory methods were employed to collect data and the analysis resulted in the writers' rationales for the choice of the elements in genre organization. The lawyers organize facts provided by a client in a predictable and logical order, and the problem-solving activities they frequently conduct before writing a letter ensure the accuracy of the facts. The lawyers' use of the elements in genre organization was based on an agreed set of conventions. The three important considerations of the lawyers interviewed regarding the organization of a letter of demand were 1) linear organization of moves and steps, 2) attention to details and 3) consistency in using the elements. It is required to make law students aware of lawyers' expectations of the structure of the genre. The students' needs should be fulfilled in genre-based activities (i.e., brainstorming, and problem-solving activities in the pre-writing stage) to raise their awareness on the responsibility of a lawyer in the genre convention.