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This paper will explore how consulting the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini and Martelli 2007) can be helpful and advantageous when tackling legal translations. To this aim, a 4-hour trial lesson with experienced translators was organized. Before the workshop, the participants translated a 300-word legal document issued within a civil case. Their translations (from English to Italian) were revised during the trial lesson, where the attendants learned how to consult the BoLC. They also used supplementary online resources, such as dictionaries and/or experts' blogs or fora. The paper findings will remark that despite some drawbacks, such as the absence of POS tagging and lemmatization, and a quite complex search syntax, the BoLC helps dispel doubts and deliver outstanding translation work. Its main usefulness lies in the possibility to find formulaic expressions and collocational use, which can be rather intricate in legal discourse.

This paper will explore how consulting the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini and Martelli 2007) can be helpful and advantageous when tackling legal translations. To this aim, a 4-hour trial lesson with experienced translators was organized. Before the workshop, the participants translated a 300-word legal document issued within a civil case. Their translations (from English to Italian) were revised during the trial lesson, where the attendants learned how to consult the BoLC. They also used supplementary online resources, such as dictionaries and/or experts' blogs or fora. The paper findings will remark that despite some drawbacks, such as the absence of POS tagging and lemmatization, and a quite complex search syntax, the BoLC helps dispel doubts and deliver outstanding translation work. Its main usefulness lies in the possibility to find formulaic expressions and collocational use, which can be rather intricate in legal discourse.

This paper will explore how consulting the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini and Martelli 2007) can be helpful and advantageous when tackling legal translations. To this aim, a 4-hour trial lesson with experienced translators was organized. Before the workshop, the participants translated a 300-word legal document issued within a civil case. Their translations (from English to Italian) were revised during the trial lesson, where the attendants learned how to consult the BoLC. They also used supplementary online resources, such as dictionaries and/or experts' blogs or fora. The paper findings will remark that despite some drawbacks, such as the absence of POS tagging and lemmatization, and a quite complex search syntax, the BoLC helps dispel doubts and deliver outstanding translation work. Its main usefulness lies in the possibility to find formulaic expressions and collocational use, which can be rather intricate in legal discourse.

Legal language is hallmarked by a pedantic and user-unfriendly jargon whose constructs are all but intuitive, not to mention the legal system specificity which makes it unique in every country. Second language (L2) learners or scholars, hence, may find it difficult to understand the language of the law; whereas translators may consider legal lexical phrases and patterns rather intricate to deal with. The literature claims that a practical way to deepen language knowledge can be found in the Web considered as corpus and in online corpora. This paper is aimed at exploring whether commercial search engines, Web concordancers and online specialised corpora can tackle the issues revolving around legal language. In particular, it will investigate whether Google advanced search and the Leeds Web concordancer can be used to meet the requirements of legal language learners, scholars and translators. Furthermore, it will address legal language queries (and results) in an online specialised corpus: the COCA. This paper will provide instances of the soundness of the above-mentioned online resources, especially when used jointly as cross-analysis tools. The shortcomings of one can, in fact, be compensated for by the other(s).

Legal language is hallmarked by a pedantic and user-unfriendly jargon whose constructs are all but intuitive, not to mention the legal system specificity which makes it unique in every country. Second language (L2) learners or scholars, hence, may find it difficult to understand the language of the law; whereas translators may consider legal lexical phrases and patterns rather intricate to deal with. The literature claims that a practical way to deepen language knowledge can be found in the Web considered as corpus and in online corpora. This paper is aimed at exploring whether commercial search engines, Web concordancers and online specialised corpora can tackle the issues revolving around legal language. In particular, it will investigate whether Google advanced search and the Leeds Web concordancer can be used to meet the requirements of legal language learners, scholars and translators. Furthermore, it will address legal language queries (and results) in an online specialised corpus: the COCA. This paper will provide instances of the soundness of the above-mentioned online resources, especially when used jointly as cross-analysis tools. The shortcomings of one can, in fact, be compensated for by the other(s).

Legal language is hallmarked by a pedantic and user-unfriendly jargon whose constructs are all but intuitive, not to mention the legal system specificity which makes it unique in every country. Second language (L2) learners or scholars, hence, may find it difficult to understand the language of the law; whereas translators may consider legal lexical phrases and patterns rather intricate to deal with. The literature claims that a practical way to deepen language knowledge can be found in the Web considered as corpus and in online corpora. This paper is aimed at exploring whether commercial search engines, Web concordancers and online specialised corpora can tackle the issues revolving around legal language. In particular, it will investigate whether Google advanced search and the Leeds Web concordancer can be used to meet the requirements of legal language learners, scholars and translators. Furthermore, it will address legal language queries (and results) in an online specialised corpus: the COCA. This paper will provide instances of the soundness of the above-mentioned online resources, especially when used jointly as cross-analysis tools. The shortcomings of one can, in fact, be compensated for by the other(s).

Legal language is hallmarked by a pedantic and user-unfriendly jargon whose constructs are all but intuitive, not to mention the legal system specificity which makes it unique in every country. Second language (L2) learners or scholars, hence, may find it difficult to understand the language of the law; whereas translators may consider legal lexical phrases and patterns rather intricate to deal with. The literature claims that a practical way to deepen language knowledge can be found in the Web considered as corpus and in online corpora. This paper is aimed at exploring whether commercial search engines, Web concordancers and online specialised corpora can tackle the issues revolving around legal language. In particular, it will investigate whether Google advanced search and the Leeds Web concordancer can be used to meet the requirements of legal language learners, scholars and translators. Furthermore, it will address legal language queries (and results) in an online specialised corpus: the COCA. This paper will provide instances of the soundness of the above-mentioned online resources, especially when used jointly as cross-analysis tools. The shortcomings of one can, in fact, be compensated for by the other(s).

European courts and legal scholars are accustomed to construing codes that have been in place for long periods of time. In the U.S., most laws are recent enough that the meanings of their words have not changed very much over time. This, however, is not true of the Constitution, which was adopted in the late 18th century. There are debates in the U.S. about how faithful current interpreters of the Constitution should be to the original meaning of the Constitution’s language, and over what it means to be faithful to the original meaning of the Constitution’s language. Should we care about what the original drafters had in mind, or about how the public that voted on the Constitution understood the language? Scholars and judges have turned to old dictionaries for help. Now, however, corpus linguistics has entered the scene, including a new corpus of general 18th century English. In this paper, I will suggest that scholars and judges interested in the meanings of the words as then understood should put themselves in the position of lexicographers writing a bilingual dictionary that translates the terms from a foreign language into contemporary English. Such a stance will bring out the many difficult problems in using a corpus as a means of making legal decisions today.