Legal language: Stylistic analysis of “Convention on Cluster Munitions”

Abstract

English is undoubtedly the most important means of communication between different nations worldwide. It is the lingua franca in most of the international gatherings, be them political, economical, social, artistic, literary etc. Similarly, in this framework, diplomatic and political interaction among nations is rapidly increasing, thus, rising the need for professionalism in translation. International law needs to be translated accurately in order to fit every country’s national political and cultural mentality.

This study analyses the peculiarities of legal translation with a focus on international treaties, namely “Convention on Cluster Munitions – CCM”, which Albania ratified and is a Member State.[1] This study focuses on the peculiarities and characteristics of legal-diplomatic language in terms of style, register, tone, sentence structure, syntax, and lexicology, the uniformity of terminology, functional equivalence and in the same time underscoring the difficulties that have been encountered during the translation of CCM.

In order to better understand the above mentioned characteristics, we will make a stylistic analysis taking into account the examples extracted from the official texts in both English (source text, ST) and Albanian (target text, TT). Even though we will confront both texts together – ST and TT – we cannot consider this analysis a contrastive and comparative one. It is not the scope of this study to compare and contrast the linguistic tools to identify the similarities and differences. On the contrary, we will focus on the style and tone of the conventions and the way these two components are linguistically portrayed in both languages.