HEURISTIC APPROACH TO SPECIALITY LANGUAGES USING CORPUS LINGUISTICS: A CASE STUDY IN LEGAL LANGUAGE

Abstract

Aimed to overcome the lack of language awareness regarding the working languages and the linguistic features of the several specialized languages by translation students, future translators, this paper presents a didactic approach, considering the text as the basic unit, in order to teach them how to make a contrastive parallel corpus-based study. Through this approach, students will be able to analyze the macrostructure (functional-situational level) and microstructure (formal-grammatical level) of a text, therefore acquiring the awareness of lexical, morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic components of the chosen texts, as well as the idiosyncrasies of each working language used in a special domain. In addition, these students will also be able to uncover the factors that influence linguistic choices from the text producer, because language is not neutral, especially when it concerns specialized languages. In order to illustrate the application of this approach, legal language has been chosen as a paradigmatic example of a specialized language, which is highly dependent on the choices of the political power regarding the values that rule a given society, at a given historical, cultural and economic moment. The study corpus is composed by Portuguese tax laws, more precisely by the IRS and IRC Codes (tax law on the income of natural persons and collective persons), in force since 1988, in the version amended by the respective decree-laws in 2010. The English translation of these codes was online in 2016 in the latter Portal das Finanças of the Direção Geral de Contribuições e Impostos (General Directorate of Taxation and Finances), renamed as Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira (Tax and Customs Authority). To replicate this approach to other specialized domains, the methodology for creating a corpus and the computing tools used for this purpose are the focus of this paper.