Supporting legal scholars’ efforts to communicate in English as a lingua franca in a globalised world: Revision of legal academic writing

Paper · 2024 · Anna Setkowicz-Ryszka

Summary

The paper looks at what goes wrong when Polish legal scholars publish in English, whether they write directly in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) or rely on translation. It also asks what this means for the people who revise those texts. The author first sets the scene: globalisation has made English the default language of international law and academic publishing, and Poland has its own experience of that shift. She then draws on her own work revising articles and abstracts for legal journals. Two areas cause the most trouble: fixed phrases (Latin expressions among them) and legal terminology. For each faulty rendering she proposes a replacement and supports it with evidence from English corpora, dictionaries, or targeted web searches. Her central argument is that, in legal scholarship, language revision cannot be cleanly separated from content and style editing, so revisers carry real weight in shaping meaning. They often act almost as co-authors, despite their low status. She concludes that lawyers need a better grasp of the pitfalls of legal translation and stronger MT literacy.

Key points

Error-prone areas. The study centres on two: fixed phrases (including Latin) and legal terminology. Proposed corrections are backed by corpus results and dictionaries.
Literal and dictionary-driven errors. Some examples are word-for-word renderings, such as "mystery of proceedings" for tajemnica postępowania, where legal privilege was meant. Others come from picking a wrong dictionary sense: an outdated meaning of wiara produced "comrades".
Rhetorical habits. Polish scholars tend to personify "the legislator" and describe its intentions and failures. Native English writing usually talks about what the law now provides, so "legislative intervention by the legislator" can be cut to legislative intervention.
Articles and prosody. Choosing between "the author of law" and "an author of law" needed a question to the author. A Google search restricted to site:uk showed that "of mining origin" collocates with negative words like pollution and debris. "Products of mining origin" returned only five hits, all from non-English-speaking domains.
MT use by legal field. Authors with foreign clients, such as commercial and tax lawyers, depend less on MT and word-for-word dictionary translation than judges do.

Interesting ideas

I1. Checking prosody with domain-restricted search: Before accepting a phrasing, search for it only on native-speaker domains and look at what it typically co-occurs with, which reveals hidden negative connotations a grammar check would miss.
I2. Definite vs indefinite article as a claim about uniqueness: Choosing "the" or "a" before a role noun commits the text to a sole holder of that role or to one of several.
I3. Ask, don't guess, when ambiguity could distort meaning: The reviser queries the author instead of silently picking a reading, because a wrong guess in a correction quietly changes the meaning.
I4. Avoiding archaic or rare dictionary senses: The "comrades" error shows that picking any listed sense, instead of the current dominant one, produces nonsense.
I5. Personified institutions as agents: The habit of making "the legislator" an intending agent where English prefers "the law provides" shows how institutions get metonymically cast as actors.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

I1 (back): The generator could score candidate collocations against native-corpus co-occurrence, so it avoids phrases that are grammatical but carry the wrong evaluative colouring.
I2 (world): When an entity is built from a role noun, the determiner could set a uniqueness flag (sole agent vs member of a set), and that flag would feed into reasoning later in the pipeline.
I3 (answer): When two parses or referents give different answers, the reader should report the ambiguity and both readings rather than committing to one and hiding the choice.
I4 (world): Sense selection from WordNet could penalise senses marked as dated or rare unless the context clearly supports them, which would cut absurd frame fillers.
I5 (frames): Agent roles filled by institution nouns like legislator or court could be linked to the underlying law or body, so that "who did what" frames stay consistent across both styles of phrasing.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Institutions

🎓University of ŁódźLodz ·

Poland2 works · 1 citation

Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5Arts and Humanities · 17,450 works Language and Linguistics · 17,296 works Social Sciences · 1,954 works Literature and Literary Theory · 541 works Law · 84 works

🧭 Topics 2English · 2,379 works Legal AI · 150 works

Cite

Cite as Anna Setkowicz-Ryszka. 2024. Supporting legal scholars’ efforts to communicate in English as a lingua franca in a globalised world: Revision of legal academic writing. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.6035/monti.2024.16.11

@inproceedings{setkowiczryszka2024supporting,
  title = {{Supporting legal scholars’ efforts to communicate in English as a lingua franca in a globalised world: Revision of legal academic writing}},
  author = {Anna Setkowicz-Ryszka},
  booktitle = {MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.6035/monti.2024.16.11},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.6035/monti.2024.16.11}
}

References

4 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

A lbl -M ikasa , Michaela. (2017) “ELF in translation/interpreting.” In: Jenkins, Jennifer; Will Baker & Martin Dewey (eds.) 2017. The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. London: Routledge, pp. 369-383. A lbl -M ikasa , Michaela & Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow. (2019) “ITELF: (E) merging Interests in Interpreting and Translation Studies.” In: Dal Fovo, Eugenia & Paola Gentile (eds.) 2019. Translation and Interpreting. Convergence, Contrast and Interaction. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 45-62. A lbl -M ikasa , Michaela; Giovanna Fontana; Laura Maria Fuchs, Lena Meret Stüdeli & Aline Zaugg. (2017) “Professional translations of non-native English: ‘before and after’ texts from the European Parliament’s Editing Unit.” The Translator 23:4, pp. 371-387. A ntonini , Rachele. (2021) “Non-professional translators and interpreters.” In: Gambier, Yves & Luc van Doorslaer (eds.) 2021. Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 171-176. find
A zuelos -A tias , Sol. (2018) “Making legal language clear to legal laypersons.” In: Kurzon Dennis & Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky (eds.) 2018. Legal Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 101-111. B ennett , Karen & Rita Queiroz de Barros. (2017) “International English its current status and implications for translation.” The Translator 23:4, pp. 363-370. B iel , Łucja. (2008) “Legal terminology in translation practice: dictionaries, Googling or discussion forums?” SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 3, pp. 22-38. http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTI03/pdf_doc/ BielLucja.pdf B iel , Łucja. (2014) “The textual fit of translated EU law: a corpus-based study of deontic modality.” The Translator 20:3, pp. 332-355. B iel , Łucja & Vilelmini Sosoni. (2019) “EU legal culture and translation in the era of globalisation. The hybridisation of EU terminology on the example of Competition Law.” In: Vogel, Friedemann (ed.) 2019. Legal Linguistics Beyond Borders. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 207-228. B iskup , Rafał. (2007) “Dobre obyczaje w działalności gospodarczej.” Annales. Etyka w życiu gospodarczym 10:1, pp. 151-161. B owker , Lynne & Jairo Buitrago Ciro. (2019) Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. B rown , Lesley (ed.). (1993) The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press. C ao , Deborah. (2007) Translating law. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. C hesterman , Andrew. (2001) “Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath.” The Translator 7:2, pp. 139-154. C ordero -M oss , Giuditta. (2011) “Conclusion: the self-sufficient contract, uniformly interpreted on the basis of its own terms: an illusion, but not fully useless.” In: Cordero-Moss, Giuditta (ed.) 2011. Boilerplate Clauses, International Commercial Contracts and the Applicable Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 344-373. C ordero -M oss , Giuditta. (2013) “International arbitration is not only international.” In: Cordero-Moss, Giuditta (ed.) 2013. International Commercial Arbitration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7-39. E ngberg , Jan. (2013) “Comparative law for translation: the key to successful mediation between legal systems.” In: Borja Albi, Anabel & Fernando Prieto Ramos (eds.) 2013. Legal Translation in Context. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 9-25. E ngberg , Jan & Kirsten Wølch Rasmussen. (2003) “Danish Legal Language in International Commercial Arbitration.” In: Bhatia, Vijay; Christopher N. Candlin & Maurizio Gotti (eds.) 2003. Legal Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 111-154. F arrell , Michael. (2023) “Do translators use machine translation and if so, how?” In: Moorkens, Joss & Vilelmini Sosoni (eds.) 2023. Translating and the Computer 44. AsLing. 24-25 November 2022 European Convention Center, Luxembourg. Geneva: Editions Tradulex, pp. 49-60. https://www.tradulex. com/varia/TC44-luxembourg2022.pdf F irat , Gökhan. (2021) “Uberization of translation. Impacts on working conditions.” The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 8:1, pp. 48-75. F ry , Deborah. (2009) “Crisis, What Crisis? Industry, What Industry?” In: Vande Walle, Jean-Marie (ed.) 2009. International Conference The World in Crisis And the Language Industry? Geneva, 13 & 14 November, 2009. Genève: Editions Tradulex. G ałuskina , Ksenia & Joanna Sycz. (2013) “Latin maxims and phrases in the Polish, English and French legal systems - the comparative study.” Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 34, pp. 9-26. https://doi.org/DOI:10.2478/ slgr-2013-0020 G émar , Jean-Claude. (2013) “Translating vs Co-Drafting in Multilingual Countries: Beyond the Canadian Odyssey.” In: Borja Albi, Anabel & Fernando Prieto Ramos (eds.) 2013. Legal Translation in Context. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 155-178. G iampieri , Patrizia. (2018) “The Web as Corpus and Online Corpora for Legal Translations.” Comparative Legilinguistics 33:1, pp. 35-56. https://doi. org/10.14746/cl.2018.33.2 G oddard , Christopher. (2009) “Where legal cultures meet: translating confrontation into coexistence.” Investigationes Linguisticae 17, pp. 168-205. https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/il/article/view/9314/9022 G oldstein , Tom & Jethro K. Lieberman. (2016 [1989]) The Lawyer’s Guide to Writing Well. Oakland: University of California Press. G otti , Maurizio. (2007) “Legal discourse in multilingual and multicultural contexts.” In: Kredens, Krzysztof & Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski (eds.) 2007. Language and the Law: International Outlooks. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 21-33. H orner , Bruce. (2017) “Written academic English as a lingua franca.” In: Jenkins, Jennifer; Will Baker & Martin Dewey (eds.) 2017. The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. London: Routledge, pp. 413-426. H ouse , Juliane. (2013) “English as a lingua franca and translation.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 7:2, pp. 279-298. H ülmbauer , Cornelia. (2009) “‘We don’t take the right way. We just take the way that we think you will understand’ - The shifting relationship between correctness and effectiveness in ELF.” In: Mauranen, Anna & Elina Ranta (eds.) 2009. English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 323-347. K auli ņ š , Kaspars. (2022) Establishing National Language Technology Platforms in EU Member States. Online: https://www.lr-coordination.eu K ecskes , Istvan & Monika Kirner-Ludwig. (2019) “‘Odd structures’ in English as a lingua franca discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 151, pp. 76-90. K ielar , Barbara Z. & Joanna Miler. (1993) “Through the looking glass of translation - The verb phrases of the statutory clauses in ‘Kodeks handlowy’ and their English renditions.” In: Miler Joanna (ed.) 1993. International Forum of Legal Translation 1992. Warszawa: TEPIS, pp. 41-53. K jær , Anne Lise. (2007) “Phrasemes in legal texts.” In: Burger, Harald et alii (eds.) 2007. Phraseologie. Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, vol. 1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 506-516. K opaczy ń ska -P ieczniak , Katarzyna. (2016) “Zasada uczciwości kupieck-iej jako zasada prawa handlowego.” Studia Iuridica Lublinensia 25:1, pp. 161-179. K ulczycki , Emanuel. (2023) The Evaluation Game. How Publication Metrics Shape Scholarly Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. K ulczycki , Emanuel; Ewa A. Rozkosz & Aneta Drabek. (2019) “Internationalization of Polish Journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Transformative Role of the Research Evaluation System.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 44:1, pp. 9-38. https://doi.org/10.29173/ cjs28794 K urek , Halina. (2015) “Język prawny i prawniczy na przełomie wieków (perspektywy badawcze i zagrożenia).” Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa 51:3, pp. 303-310. ↗
L aurén , Christer & Sauli Takala. (2018) “Dominance of ESP in various domains in the context of global English.” In: Humbley John; Gerhard Budin & Christer Laurén (eds.) 2018. Languages for Special Purposes. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 255-266. L eal , Alice. (2022) “The European Union’s translation policies, practices and ideologies: time for a translation turn.” Perspectives 30:2, pp. 195-208. Online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09076 76X.2021.1927121 L illis , Theresa & Mary Jane Curry. (2010) Academic Writing in a Global Context. The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English. London: Routledge. M atulewska , Aleksandra. (2009) “Methods of expressing deontic modality in English and Polish statutory instruments in the aspect of translation.” Comparative Legilinguistics 1:1, pp. 133-145. https://doi.org/10.14746/ cl.2009.01.10 M atulewska , Aleksandra. (2017) Contrastive Parametric Study of Legal Terminology in Polish and English. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe CONTACT. M oniz , Helena & Carla Parra Escartín (eds.). (2023) Towards Responsible Machine Translation. Ethical and Legal Considerations in Machine Translation. Cham: Springer. M oorkens , Joss. (2020) “‘A tiny cog in a large machine’: digital Taylorism in the translation industry.” Translation Spaces 9:1, pp. 12-34. M ossop , Brian. (2020 [2001]) Revising and Editing for Translators. London: Routledge. O’B rien , Sharon; Michael Simard & Marie-Josée Goulet. (2018) “Machine Translation and Self-post-editing for Academic Writing Support.” In: Moorkens, Joss et alii (eds.) 2018. Translation Quality Assessment. From Principles to Practice. Cham: Springer, pp. 237-262. Pę zik , Piotr. (2012) “Wyszukiwarka PELCRA dla danych NKJP.” In: Przepiórkowski, Adam et alii (eds.) 2012. Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo PWN, pp. 253-273. R ayar , Louise. (1999) “The quality of source texts.” In: Tomaszczyk, Jerzy (ed.) 1999. Aspects of Legal Language and Legal Translation. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, pp. 157-140. ↗
R ea R izzo , Camino & María José Marín Pérez. (2012) “Structure and design of the British Law Report Corpus (BLRC): a legal corpus of judicial decisions from the UK.” Journal of English Studies 10, pp. 131-145. S andrini , Peter. (2006) “LSP Translation and Globalization.” In: Gotti, Maurizio & Susan Šarčević (eds.) 2006. Insights into Specialized Translation. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 107-120 S andrini , Peter. (2018) “Terminology work in different domains: legal terminology.” In: Humbley John; Gerhard Budin & Christer Laurén (eds.) 2018. Languages for Special Purposes. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 509-521 Š ar č evi ć, Susan. (1997) New Approach to Legal Translation. Den Haag: Kluwer Law International. Š ar č evi ć, Susan. (1990) “Terminological Incongruency in Legal Dictionaries for Translation.” In: Magay, Tamás & Judit Zigány (eds.). BudaLEX ’88 Proceedings. Papers from the 3rd International EURALEX Congress, Budapest, 4-9 September 1988. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, pp. 439-446. S cott , Juliette. (2017) “The pernicious effects of terms used for and by the legal translation profession.” Revista de Llengua i Dret 68, pp. 57-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.2436/rld.i68.2017.2969 S etkowicz -R yszka , Anna. (2023) “Peculiarities of Polish academic legal writing in English translation: field experts vs. algorithms.” In: Moorkens, Joss & Vilelmini Sosoni (eds.) 2023. Translating and the Computer 44. AsLing. 24-25 November 2022 European Convention Center, Luxembourg. Genève: Editions Tradulex, pp. 61-69. Online: https://www.tradulex.com/varia/ TC44-luxembourg2022.pdf S etkowicz -R yszka , Anna. (2022a) “Why can plain English in contracts cause difficulties in translation into Polish?” Lingua Legis 30, pp. 45-67. Online: http://lingualegis.ils.uw.edu.pl/index.php/lingualegis/article/view/72/65 S etkowicz -R yszka , Anna. (2022b) “Wyrażenia łacińskie w polskich i angiel-skich tekstach prawniczych z perspektywy tłumacza.” In: Kujawska-Lis, Ewa; Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska & Olga Letka-Spychała (eds.) 2022. Komunikacja międzykulturowa w świetle współczesnej translatologii, vol. 9: Języki, teksty, interpretacje. Olsztyn: Wydawnictwo UWM, pp. 219-232. S pichtinger , Daniel. (2020) The Spread of English and its Appropriation. Unpublished M.A. thesis. Wien: Universität Wien. Online: https://www. researchgate.net/publication/267094642_The_Spread_of_English_and_ its_Appropriation S zemi ń ska , Weronika. (2014) “Translating law into dictionaries, or why one dictionary is not enough.” In: Budin, Gerhard & Vesna Lušicky (eds.) 2014. Languages for Special Purposes in a Multilingual, Transcultural World. Wien: Universität Wien, pp. 118-125. V ettese , Maria Celeste. (2011) “Multinational companies and national contracts.” In: Cordero-Moss, Giuditta (ed.) 2011. Boilerplate Clauses, International Commercial Contracts and the Applicable Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 20-31. V ieira , Lucas Nuñes. (2020) “Machine translation in the news.” Translation Spaces 9:1, pp. 98-122. V ieira , Lucas Nuñes; Minako O’Hagan & Carol O’Sullivan. (2021) “Understanding the societal impacts of machine translation: a critical review of the literature on medical and legal use cases.” Information, Communication & Society 24:11, pp. 1515-1532. https://doi.org/10.1080/13 69118X.2020.1776370 V ieira , Lucas Nuñes; Carol O’Sullivan; Xiaochun Zhang & Minako O’Hagan. (2022) “Machine translation in society: insights from UK users.” Language Resources and Evaluation 57, pp. 893-914. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10579-022-09589-1 W ay , Catherine (2016) “The challenges and opportunities of legal translation and translator training in the 21st Century.” International Journal of Communication 10, pp. 1009-1029. Online: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/ article/view/3580/1576 W illiams , Christopher. (2004) “Legal English and Plain Language: an introduction.” ESP Across Cultures 1, pp. 111-124. ↗

Updated 30 October 2026

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ryszka-2024-supporting-legal-scholars-efforts-communicate/