Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

In the ever-growing and competitive global marketplace, companies must look for new ways to gain a competitive advantage. One of these ways is to negotiate provisions orally while drafting the contract in istanti with four hands. This practice – meant to foster trust, cooperation, and fair understanding – has made it imperative to seek collaboration with interpreters to navigate diverse laws, business practices, and above all, cultural differences. In this more nuanced, deeply interpersonal form of transaction, liaison interpreting in contract negotiations presents itself as a complex, challenging, and fruitful area of expertise. Yet, no previous study has explored this domain, whose originality for interpreters lies in that it combines two challenging aspects: the legal language of contracts with cooperative negotiation strategies in the business field. To address this gap, the study examines an authentic, interpreter-mediated meeting between German buyers and an Italian ceramic tile manufacturer. In this scenario, English serves as the lingua franca for the negotiation. Drawing on Wadensjö’s (1998) framework for interpreting roles and renditions, along with Duranti’s (2004) concept of Agency for related ethical and socio-cultural aspects, the interpreter’s choices are ultimately evaluated from a purely unbiased and descriptive perspective within the cognitive-pragmatic framework of Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986). Findings reveal that legal interpreters need to constantly redefine and reconsider their role in this “hybrid” setting (Bhatia and Nodoushan 2015), thus blurring the boundaries between the purist vision of the impartial interpreter tasked with addressing crucial legal matters, and the involved cross-cultural mediator engaged in renegotiating identities and meanings when mutually beneficial business outcomes are expected to be achieved. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research, emphasizing the need to abandon broad interpreting clichés in favour of defining ad hoc quality standards for this area of expertise lying at the crossroads between legal and business domains.

By analyzing Dantean echoes in English Modernist literature, this paper aims at focusing on the different reinterpretations given by T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound on the three canticles of the Divine Comedy. This excursus inevitably suggests the immortal character of Dante’s masterpiece in conveying, with vivid visual images, in-depth feeling analyses of individuals and society as well, capable of going beyond time and place. In this regard, while in Eliot’s poems allusions to Dante’s Inferno have the purpose of promoting a spiritual rebirth, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the purgatorial dimension becomes the perfect stage to portray the absurdity of life in the twentieth Century. Finally, in Pound’s masterpiece, The Cantos, the ultimate dimension of joy, i.e. Paradise, appears to be broken and perceivable only through fragments, hence signaling the loss of absolute values in our post-modern society.

By drawing upon cognitive resources, professional court interpreters should uphold as a guiding principle for their choices the need to preserve the pragmatics of the ongoing interaction between legal experts and witnesses during the trial, since participants’ speech style, register and rhetorical strategies are bound to deeply influence the overall outcome of the judicial proceeding. In Italy, however, low quality standards and lack of specific training paint a grim picture of legal services with regard to the achievement of pragmatic equivalence in courtroom settings, thus suggesting the need for further research in this field. Given these premises, the aim of this paper is to propose a new didactic approach to provide adequate preliminary training for future consecutive court interpreters from English into Italian and vice-versa. In particular, after briefly discussing the issues, tasks and challenges of legal equivalence, an actual ESP course – developed in order to widen non-specialists’ pragmatic and sociolinguistic micro-skills in court interpreting – is taken as a reference for effective needs assessment, syllabus design and material selection. The rationale of this approach lies in the creation of a student-centred and rich learning environment where multi-layered teaching methodologies, audio-visual resources and corpus-linguistic evidence are tailored to the learners’ background knowledge and increasingly approximated to real-life situations. Specifically, this paper argues for the need for a flexible syllabus suitable for enhancing students’ understanding of the spoken language of the law through the creation of ‘blended learning scenarios’ in which the analysis of popular legal movies can pave the way for more challenging activities aimed at identifying – in real-life trials – translation equivalents and pragmatic patterns from a cross-cultural perspective, with the ultimate goal of fostering students’ procedural knowledge, i.e. the ability to predict and find the best interpreting solutions in professional situations when constrained by time pressure and extremely high-level expectations.

The present article aims at exploring the issue of intertextuality with reference to the specific usage of numbers in legal discourse. In this regard, the analysis of legal citations seems to be of particular interest to legal linguistics and legal translation as it concerns semantic, pragmatic and stylistic issues related to legal language. These aspects are discussed by analyzing European legislation and judicial decisions issued by the European Court of Human Rights, in order to demonstrate that legal citations are used to eliminate internal contradictions within the whole legal framework, thus reinforcing the systemic character of the law. Finally, this research focuses on the usage of numbers to achieve intelligibility and user-friendly layout in legal documents, as suggested by the Plain Language Movement.