Communicating the Law to a Wider Audience
Towards Accessible Legal Texts in Europe
Communicating the Law to a Wider Audience
Towards Accessible Legal Texts in Europe
Description
Focusing on under-researched aspects of legal communication in Europe, this volume presents state-of-the-art research into 'plain language' movements seeking to improve the comprehensibility of legislation and administrative texts for non-specialist audiences.
It provides evidence from different languages (British English, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish) and legal systems (common law, civil law, EU law), covering issues of clarity and readability across a range of genres and sources including explanatory videos, legal decisions, contracts, administrative texts, pleadings, and law blogs.
The eleven chapters cover legislative language, judicial procedures and courtroom language, as well as arbitration and institutional communication. As well as showing the applicability of various models and computational tools for measuring the comprehensibility of key texts, the chapters also take in the emergent role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation. Several studies also include an experimental dimension, gauging the impact of different measures on target audiences, for example, individuals aged 65+, and trainee legal translators. The range of chapters encourages comparisons between various approaches to communicating the law in different European countries and legal systems.
Given its wide scope and methodological diversity, the book will appeal to varied audiences including practitioners, researchers and students in the areas of law, public administration, communication, and applied linguistics.
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Table of Contents
1. Towards Accessible Legal Texts in Europe, Ruth Breeze (University of Navarra, Spain) and Magdalena Szczyrbak (Jagiellonian University, Poland & University of Pardubice, Czechia)
2. Justifying Communicative Reform: An examination of inclusive prescriptivism in the Equal Treatment Bench Book, Jamie McKeown (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
3. Plain language and the evolution of the lexical aspects of UK judgments, Paula Rodríguez-Puente (University of Oviedo, Spain)
4. The concept of Clear Language: Theoretical and practical issues for communicating German law to laypersons, Karin Luttermann (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany)
5. Reforming Legal Italian: Initiatives for plain language, Andrea Cocchini (University of Navarra, Spain)
6. Can AI make legal English more accessible? An experiment on machine-simplified legal texts, Miguel Ángel Campos-Pardillos (University of Alicante, Spain)
7. Is plain language useful for the elderly? An empirical study with Spanish administrative texts, Jenny Azarian (UNED, Spain), Iria da Cunha (UNED, Spain) and Juan Antonio Núñez Cortés (Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain)
8. Does hard work always pay off? The effect of plain-editing of legal texts on their readability and the quality of MT output, Anna Setkowicz-Ryszka (University of Lodz, Poland)
9. Understanding your lawyer's words: The VocAvv project, Jacqueline Visconti (University of Genoa, Italy)
10. From owlish professors to engaged users: Communicating arbitration to a global audience, Daniel Greineder
11. Dialogicity in legal blogging: A focus on cross-cultural variation, Marina Bondi and Giuliana Diani (University of Modena, Italy)
Product details
| Published | 13 May 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781350598249 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Series | Bloomsbury Advances in Forensic and Legal Linguistics |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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