International Criminal Court judgments: a preliminary analysis of the use of performative verbs

Much has been said and written about the characteristics of legal texts and, especially, about their performative nature. In this article, we have taken the contributions made by Austin (1991), Solan & Tiersma (2005), Janigová (2011) and Dunn (2003), among others, in order to analyze the performative nature of an opinion delivered by the International Criminal Court which was used by the students at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in their translation professional practice. Our aim is to look at how veredictive and exercitive verbs are used in this document as a way to help the translation task, given that we believe that this type of analysis is of the utmost importance if we want to maintain the illocutionary force of the source text. We hope that this is just the first of many contributions in connection with this type of texts, which are yet to be explored, as our students work with them in their professional practices.