Legal English and Plain Language: an introduction

Description

English for specific Purposes Across Cultures. — №1 — 2004. — p. 111-124.In this paper I first describe some of the main characteristics of written legal English such as sentence length and the complexity of its sentence structures, repetitiveness, the high concentration of Latinisms and archaic or rarely used lexical items etc. (Bhatia 1993). Such features have been widely held for centuries as having an exclusionary function, entrenching the privileges of the legal profession.With the growth of the Plain Language movement in recent decades in all major English-speaking countries, however, calls for radical changes in legal English have become increasingly widespread, and cases of enacted legislative texts following the principles of Plain Language can already be found in several countries, e.g. South Africa, Australia and Canada. I analyse some of the proposals of the Plain Language movement and the feasibility of making legal texts more comprehensible to the layperson without running the risk of ‘dumbing down’ such texts and creating new problems of ambiguity in interpretation that could end up by being detrimental to the public at large.