Mini Review - (2023) Volume 8, Issue 1
Legal speech is intended to convey concepts like responsibility, instructions, obligations, rights, authorization, and restriction in human interactions. These elements need to be translated carefully because they are conceptualized differently in Arabic and English. The current essay focuses on analyzing prohibition in the English version of the Iraqi penal code. This is done by creating a parallel corpus of the Arabic original text and its translation in order to examine whether the translation contains any differences from the source text that would cause the target audience to receive an incompatible message. In order to describe the various prohibition coding linguistic structures in Arabic source texts and how they are translated into English, parallel concordances are created. Then, the results are qualitatively examined to look for any translational discrepancies. A number of patterns used to convey prohibition in Arabic and English were discovered using corpus based research. The findings also show that, despite the restoration of the regulative function, there are discrepancies between the English translation and the original text regarding the strength of imposition of prohibition.
Prohibition • Forensic science • Penal code • Criminal legislation • Corpus based research
This essay examines prohibition in the English translation of the Iraqi Penal Code (henceforth IPC). The penal code, also referred to as criminal law, is a piece of writing that represents one of the most important categories of legal texts because it outlines a set of laws that deal with crimes and their punishment, or the responsibility of the individual not to carry out or abstain from doing an action. Matulewska believes that preventing the addresses from carrying out a particular action counts as a restriction. Therefore, as prohibition is a strong genre marker and seems to be the primary example of the language of the penal code, it is the subject of this study. Additionally, restriction in language and legislation is crucial since failure to communicate can have dire consequences, especially in light of the rise in foreign investments in Iraq and the influx of workers who do not understand Arabic [1].
The purpose of this work is to investigate the various language strategies used in the Arabic corpus to convey prohibition and how these strategies are translated into English in the corpus of translation. An inquiry will then be conducted to explain any variations in the distribution and price of these gadgets, as well as their causes and effects [2]. It's important to note that this appears to be the first corpus assembled for research into the nature of Iraqi law's language and translation. The corpus created for this study serves as a first step in a larger effort called the Iraqi legislation corpus, which will analyse key language aspects of the creation and translation of Iraqi laws. The present paper uses corpus tools in the analysis of data in accordance with many academics that support using corpus linguistics to further the study of legal discourse and its translation. This is because corpus tools have been shown to be an effective tool for enhancing the study of legal discourse and its translation. To take the study of the relationship between the source text and its translation beyond linguistic and cultural equivalency and toward considering the Target Text (TT) as an autonomous work with its own importance in the target culture, Baker pioneered corpus based translation studies [3]. Scholars of legal translation also acknowledged and expanded on the benefits of corpus based technique in translation studies. The use of corpus techniques to analyse various aspects of legal discourse is encouraged by Tognini-Bonelli because they "have provided insights into the language that have rattled the fundamental assumptions behind many well-established theoretical perspectives in the discipline."
Early academic studies, such as compilation of the British law corpus to highlight the key lexicon of this genre and use it in future studies on the analysis of legal discourse, can be traced as the origins of applying corpus linguistics to the study of the construction of legal discourse. The findings of Solan and Gales research emphasize the need of using corpus linguistics to analyse legal discourse and uphold the idea that corpus linguistics is still a relevant tool for analysing the language of law. Who researched the numerous patterns that distinct legal genres tend to follow through the analysis of significant elements of speech in four corpora pertaining to business law, has made another contribution to the field of corpus-based legal linguistics. It has been proven that corpus tools can show similarities and differences in how linguistic structures are used and distributed in legal discourse that cannot be easily revealed by examining texts individually. As a result, numerous studies to analyse legal discourse have been conducted using corpus tools over time. Legal corpora are rapidly expanding to include a wide range of legal texts and documents, including state legislation, forensic rulings, legal textbooks, and contracts. There are many freely accessible legal corpora. The parallel corpus of the United Nations, the digital corpus of the European parliament, and the House of Lords Judgments corpus (HOLJ). Numerous scholars have written about the incorporation of corpus linguistics to legal translation studies in the literature. "corpus based techniques are offering fresh insights into legal discourses and translation processes," Ramos argues persuasively. As they proved helpful in academic research, translation practise, and translator training, legal corpora started to be compiled. Using corpus technologies across several languages and jurisdictions, the works of Pontrandolfo and God Roszkowski, among many others, seek to add to, expand, and enrich the subject of legal translation. However, a detailed examination of the corpus based legal translation studies literature demonstrates that the availability of Arabic legal corpora is limited in comparison to the progress in this area with regard to other languages, particularly European [4]. To the best of the researcher's knowledge, this is one of the earliest initiatives made to gather a corpus of legal texts from any Arab country for the purposes of analysing legal discourse and legal translation. These texts encompass criminal law, civil law, labour law, tax law, environmental law, etc. Although there have been earlier studies that looked at the examination of Arabic in legal contexts, they only took a qualitative approach to some specific language and translation concerns in legal documents. Within translation studies, an exhaustive analysis of certain legislation is still not thoroughly addressed. This study investigates how prohibition is expressed in the IPC and its English translation to help readers better understand and realise this element. The goal of the current study is to further corpus-based legal linguistics and legal translation studies through data analysis based on corpora. The paper also intends to establish a linguistic source for the research and analysis of legal terminology and translation in general, and of Iraqi law terminology and translation in particular. The assessment of the literature reveals that while there have been several studies on the translation and analysis of legal discourse, relatively little has been done on the study of prohibition, particularly in the language of criminal law. Keith Allan asserts that prohibition is communicated in language at many different levels, including the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels [5].
Studies on the examination of prohibition in legal speech have long concentrated on doing so at a specific linguistic level. For instance, several researches on legal language have looked at prohibition in the context of pragmatics more generally. In their pragmatic examination of regulative speech actions in English contracts, Blom, Trosborg, and Trosberg clarified prohibition in the context of English law of contracts, in addition to speech acts of permission, duty, and promises. Taylor's research of the multilingualism of legislation and its impact on the integration of the European Union includes a comparative analysis of directives to take into account languages other than English (EU). Similar to Zhelyazkova, et al., Thomson, Torenvlied, and Zhelyazkova concentrate on the incorporation of various directives into EU regulations. Prohibition, which is a negative type of obligation, is expressed in legal language using deontic modality, or modals and related patterns. Matulewska and Bondi and Diani investigated prohibition using comparative linguistics as part of a larger field of deontic modality with a focus on the usage of deontic modality in the language of contracts. These investigations came to the conclusion that contracts appear to exhibit deontic modality less frequently than other types of legal documents. It looked at prohibition as it was communicated by deontic modals in a similar vein. Zelenka, Trosborg, and Biel. The results of these investigations showed a connection between legal genres and deontic modality practitioners. Reviewing earlier research on the analysis of legal language indicates how little are known about how prohibition functions independently in legal discourse in general and the language of law in particular. There doesn't appear to have been a thorough examination of this specific idea in the language of criminal law in Arabic to date. It still has to be done, but a more systematic and comprehensive analysis of prohibition has not been done. On the one hand, further study is needed on how prohibition is communicated through various linguistic levels, such as syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. On the other hand, it seems uncommon to find research on prohibition utilising corpus technologies, particularly in respect to the Arabic and English language pair [6].
The study of prohibition also needs to take into account various legal genres, different legal systems, and other languages and cultural contexts. Last but not least, a promising area of research would be the analysis of prohibition within the discipline of translation studies, i.e., to examine it in the original text and its translation in order to account for potential translator interference that might affect the value of the translated material. The current study proposes a novel approach to the study of prohibition in the language and translation of Arabic legal discourse by first examining it at various linguistic levels, then by including a new genre, namely the language of the criminal code IPC, and finally by examining it using corpus methods and corpus tools. This study addresses the research gap in this area.
Citation: Jonas K. "A Corpus Based Research of Prohibition in the Iraqi Penal Code and Its English Translation Reveals Differences in How Criminal Legislation is Translated". J Forensic Pathol, 2023, 8(1), 1-2.
Received: 30-Jan-2023, Manuscript No. JFP-23-21609; Editor assigned: 01-Feb-2023, Pre QC No. JFP-23-21609 (PQ); Reviewed: 15-Feb-2023, QC No. JFP-23-21609; Revised: 21-Apr-2023, Manuscript No. JFP-23-21609 (R); Published: 28-Apr-2023, DOI: 10.35248/2684-1312.23.8(1).353
Copyright: © 2023 Jonas K. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
