Papers by Adriano Laudisio
ESP across cultures , 2017
Legal drama is a fiction genre dealing with the professions of lawyers, judges and police and wit... more Legal drama is a fiction genre dealing with the professions of lawyers, judges and police and with law enforcement, including resolving mysterious crimes or civil litigations. Isani (2004: 28) includes it among the most successful forms of FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel, or Fiction with Professional Background), and focuses on courtroom drama and its role in language learning (Isani 2006a, 2006b). Villez (2005) also observes an educational role in it, for example in the exchanges between expert characters and non-expert ones, providing cause of discussion and reflection and allowing the acquisition of knowledge from the audience. This is particularly true for “third generation” legal drama, in which “more difficult cases [are] presented in less artificial ways” (p. 26), leaving space to discussion about contemporary legal issues and to more realistic lawsuits, narratives and characters. From a Critical Genre Analysis perspective, legal drama can be considered an example of “genre embedding”, i.e. the case in which “a particular generic form […is] used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form” (Bhatia 1997: 191), since it contains reproductions of the most significant trial phases, though in a fictional key, and appropriates the textual features of these genres.
Preliminary research (Laudisio 2015, 2016) has shown the instrumental function legal drama can have in popularizing legal-specific contents and terminology to the non-expert audience. Starting from these assumptions, this paper sets out to analyse samples from two corpora, made respectively of the original scripts in English and of the Italian fan-made translations of the American TV series The Good Wife, Suits and Boston Legal. The focus is placed on CSIs (Culture-Specific Items, Matielo and Espindola 2011) or ECRs (Extralinguistic Culture-Bound References, Pedersen 2005) connected to the United States legal system and the way they are translated, following either a ‘foreignizing’ approach or a ‘domesticating’ one (Venuti 1995). The results will show a certain degree of ‘standardization’ of the legal terminology translated by means of foreignizations and open the way to further reflections on the reasons behind the translators’ choices, among which the intention to neutralize the knowledge and the cultural gap with a non-expert, non-American audience.
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Tessuto G., Bhatia V. K., Engberg J. (2018). Frameworks for Discursive Actions and Practices of the Law. Cambridge Scholars Publishing , 2018
Despite being typically considered a field characterized by standardized practices and language, ... more Despite being typically considered a field characterized by standardized practices and language, the genres of legal practice and profession can be object of ‘hybridization’ (Fairclough 1993). This happens, for instance, when law is recontextualized in fictional contexts, as in legal dramas, TV series staging lawyers debating cases and real legal issues in front of a judge, often involving a realistic representation of the legal system.
According to Bhatia (1997: 191) genre embedding takes place when “a particular generic form, it may be poem, a story or an article [is] used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form” and legal dramas represent a shining example of this phenomenon, embedding a variety of legal specific genres ranging from trial phases (witness examinations, hearings, opening and closing arguments) to forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution.
This research aims at an analysis of legal drama as a ‘hybrid genre’ serving both a function of transmission of specialized knowledge and a primary entertaining function, drawing on a corpus made of three legal dramas: The Good Wife, Suits, and Boston Legal. It is conducted on the basis of Bhatia’s (2004: 119-132) suggestion that for a genre analysis it is necessary to take account of both “text-internal” and “text-external” factors.
‘Text internal’ factors analysed in legal dramas include:
1) Textual factors, represented by the description of significant lexical and grammatical aspects, e.g. recurring patterns, occurrence of technical terms associated with definitions and reformulations as strategies of popularization (see also Gülich 2003, Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, Garzone 2006, Gotti 2014, Anesa 2012) etc.;
2) Contextual factors, with a particular focus on the expert-lay relationship between the speakers and the way specialized contents are mediated for a non-expert audience;
3) Intertextual factors, represented by the explicit reference to other texts (e.g. quotations of regulations and of previous cases) and text embedding.
‘Text external’ factors, instead, are regarded by the focus on interdiscursivity and genre embedding (e.g. the phases of a trial) and on the representation of professional practices (mediation, arbitration, litigation, see also Bhatia, Candlin and Gotti 2010).
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Di GIovanni, E., Raffi, F. (2017). Languaging Diversity Volume 3: Language(s) and Power, 2017
Legal dramas are TV fictions staging the professional and private life of judges and lawyers, in ... more Legal dramas are TV fictions staging the professional and private life of judges and lawyers, in which specialized language (legal terminology, courtroom formulae etc.) and specialized genres (e.g. all the trial phases) are embedded and recontextualized into a fictional frame serving the main entertainment purpose of this genre. According to Bhatia (1997: 191) the use of a particular generic form “as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form” represents an instance of ‘genre embedding’ and creates ‘genre hybridity’ (see also Bhatia 2004).
Besides their entertainment value, in fact, legal dramas can also serve a popularizing and pedagogical function: studies on FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel) have proved the possibility of exploiting fictional genres in language acquisition, in particular professional competence in ESP courses (Petit 1999, Isani 2004, 2006a, 2006b, Chapon 2011, O’ Connell 2012).
By means of a qualitative analysis of a corpus of three US-based legal dramas (The Good Wife, Suits and Boston Legal), this research paper aims at observing interactions among expert (lawyers and judges) and non-expert characters (witnesses and clients) which are exploited by the legal drama authors to provide the audience with explanations about legal principles and practices.
In particular, a critical analysis of:
a) judge-lawyer interactions
b) lawyer-lawyer interactions (cooperative vs. non-cooperative)
c) lawyer-witness interactions (cooperative vs. non-cooperative) and
d) lawyer-client interactions
will show that in legal contexts power is associated with knowledge and that language is shaped differently according to the persuasive intentions of the speakers and power relations between the participants.
Finally, a comparison with previous case studies on courtroom discourse (Cotterill 2003, Heffer 2005, Anesa 2012) will also shed light on the way fictional products reproduce courtroom interactions and to what extent they reflect ‘real’ courtrooms.
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ILCEA - Récits fictionnels et non-fictionnels liés à des communautés professionnelles et à des groupes spécialisés, 2018
Studies in ESP have recently expanded from investigating specialized language in use in professio... more Studies in ESP have recently expanded from investigating specialized language in use in professional environments to encompassing their use in different contexts with other purposes, among which artistic and entertainment ones. In particular, studies on FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel), i.e. fictional novels based on specific professional figures and fields, or the more recent studies in specialized TV series, offer a new perspective to analyzing how ESP intertwines with fictional narrativity.
Among the most common FASP genres, legal FASP television series represent a good example of how this multimodal fictional genre exploits ESP by embedding the principles, procedures, professionals and the related terminology of the United States courtrooms and law firms into the heart of the plot.
This paper sets out to describe the function of narration in legal drama. Drawing upon Labov’s 1977 ‘evaluation’ model, a corpus of scenes of narrations in and out of the courtroom drawn from three legal dramas (Boston Legal, Suits and The Good Wife) is analyzed, looking at narration as constitutive of the sub-genres embedded in legal drama (e.g. witness examination) and as a means of popularizing legal-specific contents.
In reference to this last point, a number of popularization strategies are identified which rely on the ‘narrative mode’, a way of expressing concepts through contextualization, further divided into actional, intersubjective and normative sub-modes, which is shown to be constitutive of legal-lay discourse. In particular, the ‘shift’ from ‘narrative’ to the ‘paradigmatic’ mode shows how narration can contribute to the popularization of legal-specific contents.
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Canepari, M., Mansfieldi, G., Poppi, F. (2016). Remediating, Rescripting, Remaking. Language and Translation in the New Media. Parma: Carocci. , 2016
The main purpose of this research is to demonstrate how the audiovisual medium can affect the fea... more The main purpose of this research is to demonstrate how the audiovisual medium can affect the features of a special language and be a primary source of popularisation. The analysis is conducted on a corpus made of the subtitles of the episodes of the legal drama The Good Wife (USA, 2009-today) chosen as representative of a broader corpus, which will include other legal dramas.
In the first phase of the study, the ‘legal drama’ genre is shown and described appealing to a Critical Genre Analysis approach: it displays the formal features of a genre with entertainment purposes (as all TV series), but as most scenes take place in courts or in legal offices and as the protagonists are mostly lawyers, the use of legal English is central to understand the way the plot is developed. According to Bhatia (2012: 25), the intertwining of the specific narrative constraints and the professional features of the characters make legal drama a genre characterised by hybridisation phenomena.
The core of the paper is the analysis of the popularising nature of this hybrid genre, which emerges from the scenes in which the ‘knowledge asymmetry’ between expert characters and non-expert characters is staged. In such scenes, it is shown how one single specialised content can be expressed in different ways, according to who the interlocutors are.
Drawing on the theoretical framework and the analytical approach proposed by Heffer (2005), which allow a classification of ‘meaning-making’ utterances according to a ‘paradigmatic’ and a ‘narrative’ mode, the main popularising strategies used in legal dramas are pointed out. Thanks to the analysis, the importance of intralinguistic translation, seen as reformulation in other words, register and styles, has emerged: screenwriters use intralinguistic translation and techniques such as reformulation and rewording to pursue their purpose of reaching a larger share of (non-expert) audience. The analysis will demonstrate that legal dramas can be a means for the popularisation of technical knowledge and that as a hybrid legal genre, popularisation strategies found in them can be assimilated to those used in other legal genres.
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Bhatia, V.K., Chiavetta, E., Sciarrino, S. (2015). Variations in Specialized Genres. Standardization and Popularization. Tuebingen: G. Narr. , 2015
This paper focuses on the results of my recent research in audiovisual translation for my Ph.D. t... more This paper focuses on the results of my recent research in audiovisual translation for my Ph.D. thesis in English for Special Purposes. The aim of the research is to analyze the use of special languages in very popular TV series and how the power relationships are “translated” from the source language to the target language.
In particular, this paper aims to analyze two special languages: the legal and the medical one, respectively represented in the TV series “The Good Wife” and “Grey’s Anatomy”.
For what concerns medical language, the focus is on the difference between communication happening among experts and communication from expert to a non-expert interlocutor: the very example of how popularization of specialized discourse is enabled is given by surgeons speaking to each other during case presentations compared to how surgeons themselves try to explain diseases or surgery to the patient or to his/her relatives by using a lower register and more common words (see attachment Nr. 1). The scenes containing fragments of popularized medical discourse are compared with the Italian translations in order to discover whether the power distance relationships are respected in the translation process.
As for legal language, instead, the focus is on the use of court terminology and standard formulae by the judge and the lawyers and popularization is represented by lawyers trying to explain legal discourse to the defendants (see attachment Nr. 2). In this case too, scenes containing legal discourse are compared with the Italian translations and power distance relationships are analyzed.
Attachment Nr. 1
ENGLISH (SL)
ITALIAN (TL)
Dr. Yang: We've done the initial surgery on Julie's omphalocele.
A primary closure was attempted, but there was pulmonary compromise, so we couldn't contin...
Dr. Bailey: Yang, how about we do this in plain English?
Dr. Yang: Oh, um, we operated on Julie's external sack of organs, and we pushed in as much of the bowel as we could, and we think we can push in the rest with a second operation.
Dott. Yang: Abbiamo fatto una prima operazione sull'onfalocele di Julie.
E' stata tentata una prima chiusura, ma ci sono state complicazioni polmonari, così non abbiamo pot...
Dott. Bailey: Yang, che ne dice di un linguaggio più chiaro?
Dott. Yang: Oh, hum, abbiamo operato la sacca esterna che contiene gli organi di Julie, e abbiamo rimesso dentro l'intestino
più che abbiamo potuto, e crediamo di poterlo spingere ancora dentro
con una seconda operazione.
Attachment Nr. 2
ENGLISH (SL)
C: Customer
W: Will
D: Diane ITALIAN (TL)
C: Cliente
W: Will
D: Diane
197
C: We don't have to go to court?
198
He just offered that?
199
W: You'll have to sign a standard
confidentiality agreement.
200
Both parties free each other of liability
201
and agree not to speak to
anyone, including the press.
206
C: Can't we tell the police?
207
D: Not if we sign a confidentiality agreement.
208
McKeon could withdraw the award
and sue you for defamation. 148
C: Non dobbiamo andare in tribunale?
Ha solo fatto un'offerta?
149
W: Deve firmare un accordo
standard di riservatezza
150
Le parti si liberano da ogni responsabilità
e promettono di non parlarne,
151
nemmeno con la stampa.
154
C: Non possiamo dirlo alla polizia?
D: Non se firmiamo un accordo di riservatezza.
155
McKeon potrebbe ritirare il risarcimento
e citarla per diffamazione.
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Balirano G., Nisco M.C. (eds.), Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses.
Abstract
The purpose of this research is to analyse the process of popularization of a special la... more Abstract
The purpose of this research is to analyse the process of popularization of a special language after a change in the communicative context.
In particular, the analysis is conducted on the legal English used in the TV series ‘The Good Wife’.
The starting point for this study is in the analysis of the genre known as ‘legal drama’. According to what Bhatia claims (1997, 2004) it can be considered an example of an “embedded genre”:
[The] definition of embedded genre is that when imported into a new context, a given genre will be altered (Bhatia 1997, in Lähdesmäki 2009).
In genre embedding, for example, one often finds a particular generic form, it may be poem, a story or an article used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form (Bhatia 1997).
In the analysis of legal drama by its text-internal features, indeed, it can be noticed that the fictional legal English employed is similar to those of the discourse community of lawyers and of court proceedings, and it is embedded in the template of conversations which are written, instead, for an audiovisual product with entertainment purposes.
However, the analysis of the genre is not only conducted from a purely linguistic point of view, but also taking into account text-external factors, among which the identities of the participants to the conversation (Bhatia 2004). The difference between a conversation involving two expert speakers (specialized discourse) and a conversation between an expert speaker and a layman (popularized discourse) will be analyzed and the focus will be on the variation or the re-construction of the identity of the expert speaker according to the context variation.
In particular, attention is paid to the comparison of scenes in which lawyers communicate one single specialist content; but in the first case they do it to an expert person (e.g. other lawyers/judge) and in a second moment they convey it to a non-expert interlocutor (e.g. customers).
In this way the change in the language and how the ‘exclusion’ of the interlocutor from the discourse community affects the language are highlighted.
In addition to the definition of the genre ‘legal drama’, the final aim of the research is to answer the following questions:
1) Why and how can Special Languages be modified in mixed/embedded genres?
2) Which are the popularization strategies in legal drama?
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Drafts by Adriano Laudisio
The object of this article is one particular audiovisual genre, US courtroom drama, along with it... more The object of this article is one particular audiovisual genre, US courtroom drama, along with its translation and adaptation into Italian. The previously conducted studies on the genre in question (Laudisio 2015) have demonstrated that courtroom drama (as well as other specialized TV genres, e.g. medical drama) can be considered as belonging to the specialized-popularized genres “continuum” (Cloître and Shinn 1985, Hilgartner 1990, Bucchi 2008) and highlighted its hybrid nature. Courtroom drama is in fact built upon a structure staging scenes set in the courtroom and showing the trial phases, interchanging with scenes set outside the courtroom, such as office conversation between law experts (attorneys) and non-experts (clients) and is thus an instance of “genre-embedding” (Bhatia 1997, 2004). Such instances of lay-expert communication, where linguistic strategies such as reformulation, denomination, definition etc. recur (cf. Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, Garzone 2006), are employed to transfer highly specialized contents to a non-expert audience. In addition to the ‘adaptation’ of the scripts for the lay audience, the international distribution of the series imposes the translation and the adaptation into foreign languages and their respective cultures, transferring a share of United States culture into other cultures, but also giving rise to complex issues of cultural and linguistic adaptability.
By means of a corpus made of ‘official’ and ‘fan-made’ subtitled and dubbed Italian versions of three courtroom dramas (The Good Wife, Suits, Boston Legal), an analysis is carried out of the adaptation of culturally-bound elements, especially those concerning the US legal system (e.g. the organization of the US trial and the explanation of its phases or of concepts referred to in the Constitution). The aim of the analysis is to provide an overview of the choices made by the translators, with particular attention to the way specialized knowledge is negotiated and popularized for the non-expert, Italian audience, though taking account of the generic conventions of courtroom drama which contribute to the representation of the source culture into the target one.
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Books by Adriano Laudisio
English for healthcare professionals - A toolkit for developing language skills and genre knowledge (with D. Giordano) , 2022
English for Healthcare Professionals offers a new guide to medical English language addressed to ... more English for Healthcare Professionals offers a new guide to medical English language addressed to degrees in medical and health sciences and professionals with an intermediate level of English. The book is divided into twelve Units grouped together in Part One and Part Two. Each Unit contains lead-in sections in major healthcare topics supported by visual tools, a grammar focus with exercises, and a healthcare terms glossary, allowing students to apply language skills to a range of professional healthcare-related contexts. Part Three sensitizes students to the understanding of doctor-patient communication and of different medical writing genres, enhancing the development of skills to participate in academic or professional communities.
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Papers by Adriano Laudisio
Preliminary research (Laudisio 2015, 2016) has shown the instrumental function legal drama can have in popularizing legal-specific contents and terminology to the non-expert audience. Starting from these assumptions, this paper sets out to analyse samples from two corpora, made respectively of the original scripts in English and of the Italian fan-made translations of the American TV series The Good Wife, Suits and Boston Legal. The focus is placed on CSIs (Culture-Specific Items, Matielo and Espindola 2011) or ECRs (Extralinguistic Culture-Bound References, Pedersen 2005) connected to the United States legal system and the way they are translated, following either a ‘foreignizing’ approach or a ‘domesticating’ one (Venuti 1995). The results will show a certain degree of ‘standardization’ of the legal terminology translated by means of foreignizations and open the way to further reflections on the reasons behind the translators’ choices, among which the intention to neutralize the knowledge and the cultural gap with a non-expert, non-American audience.
According to Bhatia (1997: 191) genre embedding takes place when “a particular generic form, it may be poem, a story or an article [is] used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form” and legal dramas represent a shining example of this phenomenon, embedding a variety of legal specific genres ranging from trial phases (witness examinations, hearings, opening and closing arguments) to forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution.
This research aims at an analysis of legal drama as a ‘hybrid genre’ serving both a function of transmission of specialized knowledge and a primary entertaining function, drawing on a corpus made of three legal dramas: The Good Wife, Suits, and Boston Legal. It is conducted on the basis of Bhatia’s (2004: 119-132) suggestion that for a genre analysis it is necessary to take account of both “text-internal” and “text-external” factors.
‘Text internal’ factors analysed in legal dramas include:
1) Textual factors, represented by the description of significant lexical and grammatical aspects, e.g. recurring patterns, occurrence of technical terms associated with definitions and reformulations as strategies of popularization (see also Gülich 2003, Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, Garzone 2006, Gotti 2014, Anesa 2012) etc.;
2) Contextual factors, with a particular focus on the expert-lay relationship between the speakers and the way specialized contents are mediated for a non-expert audience;
3) Intertextual factors, represented by the explicit reference to other texts (e.g. quotations of regulations and of previous cases) and text embedding.
‘Text external’ factors, instead, are regarded by the focus on interdiscursivity and genre embedding (e.g. the phases of a trial) and on the representation of professional practices (mediation, arbitration, litigation, see also Bhatia, Candlin and Gotti 2010).
Besides their entertainment value, in fact, legal dramas can also serve a popularizing and pedagogical function: studies on FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel) have proved the possibility of exploiting fictional genres in language acquisition, in particular professional competence in ESP courses (Petit 1999, Isani 2004, 2006a, 2006b, Chapon 2011, O’ Connell 2012).
By means of a qualitative analysis of a corpus of three US-based legal dramas (The Good Wife, Suits and Boston Legal), this research paper aims at observing interactions among expert (lawyers and judges) and non-expert characters (witnesses and clients) which are exploited by the legal drama authors to provide the audience with explanations about legal principles and practices.
In particular, a critical analysis of:
a) judge-lawyer interactions
b) lawyer-lawyer interactions (cooperative vs. non-cooperative)
c) lawyer-witness interactions (cooperative vs. non-cooperative) and
d) lawyer-client interactions
will show that in legal contexts power is associated with knowledge and that language is shaped differently according to the persuasive intentions of the speakers and power relations between the participants.
Finally, a comparison with previous case studies on courtroom discourse (Cotterill 2003, Heffer 2005, Anesa 2012) will also shed light on the way fictional products reproduce courtroom interactions and to what extent they reflect ‘real’ courtrooms.
Among the most common FASP genres, legal FASP television series represent a good example of how this multimodal fictional genre exploits ESP by embedding the principles, procedures, professionals and the related terminology of the United States courtrooms and law firms into the heart of the plot.
This paper sets out to describe the function of narration in legal drama. Drawing upon Labov’s 1977 ‘evaluation’ model, a corpus of scenes of narrations in and out of the courtroom drawn from three legal dramas (Boston Legal, Suits and The Good Wife) is analyzed, looking at narration as constitutive of the sub-genres embedded in legal drama (e.g. witness examination) and as a means of popularizing legal-specific contents.
In reference to this last point, a number of popularization strategies are identified which rely on the ‘narrative mode’, a way of expressing concepts through contextualization, further divided into actional, intersubjective and normative sub-modes, which is shown to be constitutive of legal-lay discourse. In particular, the ‘shift’ from ‘narrative’ to the ‘paradigmatic’ mode shows how narration can contribute to the popularization of legal-specific contents.
In the first phase of the study, the ‘legal drama’ genre is shown and described appealing to a Critical Genre Analysis approach: it displays the formal features of a genre with entertainment purposes (as all TV series), but as most scenes take place in courts or in legal offices and as the protagonists are mostly lawyers, the use of legal English is central to understand the way the plot is developed. According to Bhatia (2012: 25), the intertwining of the specific narrative constraints and the professional features of the characters make legal drama a genre characterised by hybridisation phenomena.
The core of the paper is the analysis of the popularising nature of this hybrid genre, which emerges from the scenes in which the ‘knowledge asymmetry’ between expert characters and non-expert characters is staged. In such scenes, it is shown how one single specialised content can be expressed in different ways, according to who the interlocutors are.
Drawing on the theoretical framework and the analytical approach proposed by Heffer (2005), which allow a classification of ‘meaning-making’ utterances according to a ‘paradigmatic’ and a ‘narrative’ mode, the main popularising strategies used in legal dramas are pointed out. Thanks to the analysis, the importance of intralinguistic translation, seen as reformulation in other words, register and styles, has emerged: screenwriters use intralinguistic translation and techniques such as reformulation and rewording to pursue their purpose of reaching a larger share of (non-expert) audience. The analysis will demonstrate that legal dramas can be a means for the popularisation of technical knowledge and that as a hybrid legal genre, popularisation strategies found in them can be assimilated to those used in other legal genres.
In particular, this paper aims to analyze two special languages: the legal and the medical one, respectively represented in the TV series “The Good Wife” and “Grey’s Anatomy”.
For what concerns medical language, the focus is on the difference between communication happening among experts and communication from expert to a non-expert interlocutor: the very example of how popularization of specialized discourse is enabled is given by surgeons speaking to each other during case presentations compared to how surgeons themselves try to explain diseases or surgery to the patient or to his/her relatives by using a lower register and more common words (see attachment Nr. 1). The scenes containing fragments of popularized medical discourse are compared with the Italian translations in order to discover whether the power distance relationships are respected in the translation process.
As for legal language, instead, the focus is on the use of court terminology and standard formulae by the judge and the lawyers and popularization is represented by lawyers trying to explain legal discourse to the defendants (see attachment Nr. 2). In this case too, scenes containing legal discourse are compared with the Italian translations and power distance relationships are analyzed.
Attachment Nr. 1
ENGLISH (SL)
ITALIAN (TL)
Dr. Yang: We've done the initial surgery on Julie's omphalocele.
A primary closure was attempted, but there was pulmonary compromise, so we couldn't contin...
Dr. Bailey: Yang, how about we do this in plain English?
Dr. Yang: Oh, um, we operated on Julie's external sack of organs, and we pushed in as much of the bowel as we could, and we think we can push in the rest with a second operation.
Dott. Yang: Abbiamo fatto una prima operazione sull'onfalocele di Julie.
E' stata tentata una prima chiusura, ma ci sono state complicazioni polmonari, così non abbiamo pot...
Dott. Bailey: Yang, che ne dice di un linguaggio più chiaro?
Dott. Yang: Oh, hum, abbiamo operato la sacca esterna che contiene gli organi di Julie, e abbiamo rimesso dentro l'intestino
più che abbiamo potuto, e crediamo di poterlo spingere ancora dentro
con una seconda operazione.
Attachment Nr. 2
ENGLISH (SL)
C: Customer
W: Will
D: Diane ITALIAN (TL)
C: Cliente
W: Will
D: Diane
197
C: We don't have to go to court?
198
He just offered that?
199
W: You'll have to sign a standard
confidentiality agreement.
200
Both parties free each other of liability
201
and agree not to speak to
anyone, including the press.
206
C: Can't we tell the police?
207
D: Not if we sign a confidentiality agreement.
208
McKeon could withdraw the award
and sue you for defamation. 148
C: Non dobbiamo andare in tribunale?
Ha solo fatto un'offerta?
149
W: Deve firmare un accordo
standard di riservatezza
150
Le parti si liberano da ogni responsabilità
e promettono di non parlarne,
151
nemmeno con la stampa.
154
C: Non possiamo dirlo alla polizia?
D: Non se firmiamo un accordo di riservatezza.
155
McKeon potrebbe ritirare il risarcimento
e citarla per diffamazione.
The purpose of this research is to analyse the process of popularization of a special language after a change in the communicative context.
In particular, the analysis is conducted on the legal English used in the TV series ‘The Good Wife’.
The starting point for this study is in the analysis of the genre known as ‘legal drama’. According to what Bhatia claims (1997, 2004) it can be considered an example of an “embedded genre”:
[The] definition of embedded genre is that when imported into a new context, a given genre will be altered (Bhatia 1997, in Lähdesmäki 2009).
In genre embedding, for example, one often finds a particular generic form, it may be poem, a story or an article used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form (Bhatia 1997).
In the analysis of legal drama by its text-internal features, indeed, it can be noticed that the fictional legal English employed is similar to those of the discourse community of lawyers and of court proceedings, and it is embedded in the template of conversations which are written, instead, for an audiovisual product with entertainment purposes.
However, the analysis of the genre is not only conducted from a purely linguistic point of view, but also taking into account text-external factors, among which the identities of the participants to the conversation (Bhatia 2004). The difference between a conversation involving two expert speakers (specialized discourse) and a conversation between an expert speaker and a layman (popularized discourse) will be analyzed and the focus will be on the variation or the re-construction of the identity of the expert speaker according to the context variation.
In particular, attention is paid to the comparison of scenes in which lawyers communicate one single specialist content; but in the first case they do it to an expert person (e.g. other lawyers/judge) and in a second moment they convey it to a non-expert interlocutor (e.g. customers).
In this way the change in the language and how the ‘exclusion’ of the interlocutor from the discourse community affects the language are highlighted.
In addition to the definition of the genre ‘legal drama’, the final aim of the research is to answer the following questions:
1) Why and how can Special Languages be modified in mixed/embedded genres?
2) Which are the popularization strategies in legal drama?
Drafts by Adriano Laudisio
By means of a corpus made of ‘official’ and ‘fan-made’ subtitled and dubbed Italian versions of three courtroom dramas (The Good Wife, Suits, Boston Legal), an analysis is carried out of the adaptation of culturally-bound elements, especially those concerning the US legal system (e.g. the organization of the US trial and the explanation of its phases or of concepts referred to in the Constitution). The aim of the analysis is to provide an overview of the choices made by the translators, with particular attention to the way specialized knowledge is negotiated and popularized for the non-expert, Italian audience, though taking account of the generic conventions of courtroom drama which contribute to the representation of the source culture into the target one.
Books by Adriano Laudisio
Preliminary research (Laudisio 2015, 2016) has shown the instrumental function legal drama can have in popularizing legal-specific contents and terminology to the non-expert audience. Starting from these assumptions, this paper sets out to analyse samples from two corpora, made respectively of the original scripts in English and of the Italian fan-made translations of the American TV series The Good Wife, Suits and Boston Legal. The focus is placed on CSIs (Culture-Specific Items, Matielo and Espindola 2011) or ECRs (Extralinguistic Culture-Bound References, Pedersen 2005) connected to the United States legal system and the way they are translated, following either a ‘foreignizing’ approach or a ‘domesticating’ one (Venuti 1995). The results will show a certain degree of ‘standardization’ of the legal terminology translated by means of foreignizations and open the way to further reflections on the reasons behind the translators’ choices, among which the intention to neutralize the knowledge and the cultural gap with a non-expert, non-American audience.
According to Bhatia (1997: 191) genre embedding takes place when “a particular generic form, it may be poem, a story or an article [is] used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form” and legal dramas represent a shining example of this phenomenon, embedding a variety of legal specific genres ranging from trial phases (witness examinations, hearings, opening and closing arguments) to forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution.
This research aims at an analysis of legal drama as a ‘hybrid genre’ serving both a function of transmission of specialized knowledge and a primary entertaining function, drawing on a corpus made of three legal dramas: The Good Wife, Suits, and Boston Legal. It is conducted on the basis of Bhatia’s (2004: 119-132) suggestion that for a genre analysis it is necessary to take account of both “text-internal” and “text-external” factors.
‘Text internal’ factors analysed in legal dramas include:
1) Textual factors, represented by the description of significant lexical and grammatical aspects, e.g. recurring patterns, occurrence of technical terms associated with definitions and reformulations as strategies of popularization (see also Gülich 2003, Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, Garzone 2006, Gotti 2014, Anesa 2012) etc.;
2) Contextual factors, with a particular focus on the expert-lay relationship between the speakers and the way specialized contents are mediated for a non-expert audience;
3) Intertextual factors, represented by the explicit reference to other texts (e.g. quotations of regulations and of previous cases) and text embedding.
‘Text external’ factors, instead, are regarded by the focus on interdiscursivity and genre embedding (e.g. the phases of a trial) and on the representation of professional practices (mediation, arbitration, litigation, see also Bhatia, Candlin and Gotti 2010).
Besides their entertainment value, in fact, legal dramas can also serve a popularizing and pedagogical function: studies on FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel) have proved the possibility of exploiting fictional genres in language acquisition, in particular professional competence in ESP courses (Petit 1999, Isani 2004, 2006a, 2006b, Chapon 2011, O’ Connell 2012).
By means of a qualitative analysis of a corpus of three US-based legal dramas (The Good Wife, Suits and Boston Legal), this research paper aims at observing interactions among expert (lawyers and judges) and non-expert characters (witnesses and clients) which are exploited by the legal drama authors to provide the audience with explanations about legal principles and practices.
In particular, a critical analysis of:
a) judge-lawyer interactions
b) lawyer-lawyer interactions (cooperative vs. non-cooperative)
c) lawyer-witness interactions (cooperative vs. non-cooperative) and
d) lawyer-client interactions
will show that in legal contexts power is associated with knowledge and that language is shaped differently according to the persuasive intentions of the speakers and power relations between the participants.
Finally, a comparison with previous case studies on courtroom discourse (Cotterill 2003, Heffer 2005, Anesa 2012) will also shed light on the way fictional products reproduce courtroom interactions and to what extent they reflect ‘real’ courtrooms.
Among the most common FASP genres, legal FASP television series represent a good example of how this multimodal fictional genre exploits ESP by embedding the principles, procedures, professionals and the related terminology of the United States courtrooms and law firms into the heart of the plot.
This paper sets out to describe the function of narration in legal drama. Drawing upon Labov’s 1977 ‘evaluation’ model, a corpus of scenes of narrations in and out of the courtroom drawn from three legal dramas (Boston Legal, Suits and The Good Wife) is analyzed, looking at narration as constitutive of the sub-genres embedded in legal drama (e.g. witness examination) and as a means of popularizing legal-specific contents.
In reference to this last point, a number of popularization strategies are identified which rely on the ‘narrative mode’, a way of expressing concepts through contextualization, further divided into actional, intersubjective and normative sub-modes, which is shown to be constitutive of legal-lay discourse. In particular, the ‘shift’ from ‘narrative’ to the ‘paradigmatic’ mode shows how narration can contribute to the popularization of legal-specific contents.
In the first phase of the study, the ‘legal drama’ genre is shown and described appealing to a Critical Genre Analysis approach: it displays the formal features of a genre with entertainment purposes (as all TV series), but as most scenes take place in courts or in legal offices and as the protagonists are mostly lawyers, the use of legal English is central to understand the way the plot is developed. According to Bhatia (2012: 25), the intertwining of the specific narrative constraints and the professional features of the characters make legal drama a genre characterised by hybridisation phenomena.
The core of the paper is the analysis of the popularising nature of this hybrid genre, which emerges from the scenes in which the ‘knowledge asymmetry’ between expert characters and non-expert characters is staged. In such scenes, it is shown how one single specialised content can be expressed in different ways, according to who the interlocutors are.
Drawing on the theoretical framework and the analytical approach proposed by Heffer (2005), which allow a classification of ‘meaning-making’ utterances according to a ‘paradigmatic’ and a ‘narrative’ mode, the main popularising strategies used in legal dramas are pointed out. Thanks to the analysis, the importance of intralinguistic translation, seen as reformulation in other words, register and styles, has emerged: screenwriters use intralinguistic translation and techniques such as reformulation and rewording to pursue their purpose of reaching a larger share of (non-expert) audience. The analysis will demonstrate that legal dramas can be a means for the popularisation of technical knowledge and that as a hybrid legal genre, popularisation strategies found in them can be assimilated to those used in other legal genres.
In particular, this paper aims to analyze two special languages: the legal and the medical one, respectively represented in the TV series “The Good Wife” and “Grey’s Anatomy”.
For what concerns medical language, the focus is on the difference between communication happening among experts and communication from expert to a non-expert interlocutor: the very example of how popularization of specialized discourse is enabled is given by surgeons speaking to each other during case presentations compared to how surgeons themselves try to explain diseases or surgery to the patient or to his/her relatives by using a lower register and more common words (see attachment Nr. 1). The scenes containing fragments of popularized medical discourse are compared with the Italian translations in order to discover whether the power distance relationships are respected in the translation process.
As for legal language, instead, the focus is on the use of court terminology and standard formulae by the judge and the lawyers and popularization is represented by lawyers trying to explain legal discourse to the defendants (see attachment Nr. 2). In this case too, scenes containing legal discourse are compared with the Italian translations and power distance relationships are analyzed.
Attachment Nr. 1
ENGLISH (SL)
ITALIAN (TL)
Dr. Yang: We've done the initial surgery on Julie's omphalocele.
A primary closure was attempted, but there was pulmonary compromise, so we couldn't contin...
Dr. Bailey: Yang, how about we do this in plain English?
Dr. Yang: Oh, um, we operated on Julie's external sack of organs, and we pushed in as much of the bowel as we could, and we think we can push in the rest with a second operation.
Dott. Yang: Abbiamo fatto una prima operazione sull'onfalocele di Julie.
E' stata tentata una prima chiusura, ma ci sono state complicazioni polmonari, così non abbiamo pot...
Dott. Bailey: Yang, che ne dice di un linguaggio più chiaro?
Dott. Yang: Oh, hum, abbiamo operato la sacca esterna che contiene gli organi di Julie, e abbiamo rimesso dentro l'intestino
più che abbiamo potuto, e crediamo di poterlo spingere ancora dentro
con una seconda operazione.
Attachment Nr. 2
ENGLISH (SL)
C: Customer
W: Will
D: Diane ITALIAN (TL)
C: Cliente
W: Will
D: Diane
197
C: We don't have to go to court?
198
He just offered that?
199
W: You'll have to sign a standard
confidentiality agreement.
200
Both parties free each other of liability
201
and agree not to speak to
anyone, including the press.
206
C: Can't we tell the police?
207
D: Not if we sign a confidentiality agreement.
208
McKeon could withdraw the award
and sue you for defamation. 148
C: Non dobbiamo andare in tribunale?
Ha solo fatto un'offerta?
149
W: Deve firmare un accordo
standard di riservatezza
150
Le parti si liberano da ogni responsabilità
e promettono di non parlarne,
151
nemmeno con la stampa.
154
C: Non possiamo dirlo alla polizia?
D: Non se firmiamo un accordo di riservatezza.
155
McKeon potrebbe ritirare il risarcimento
e citarla per diffamazione.
The purpose of this research is to analyse the process of popularization of a special language after a change in the communicative context.
In particular, the analysis is conducted on the legal English used in the TV series ‘The Good Wife’.
The starting point for this study is in the analysis of the genre known as ‘legal drama’. According to what Bhatia claims (1997, 2004) it can be considered an example of an “embedded genre”:
[The] definition of embedded genre is that when imported into a new context, a given genre will be altered (Bhatia 1997, in Lähdesmäki 2009).
In genre embedding, for example, one often finds a particular generic form, it may be poem, a story or an article used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form (Bhatia 1997).
In the analysis of legal drama by its text-internal features, indeed, it can be noticed that the fictional legal English employed is similar to those of the discourse community of lawyers and of court proceedings, and it is embedded in the template of conversations which are written, instead, for an audiovisual product with entertainment purposes.
However, the analysis of the genre is not only conducted from a purely linguistic point of view, but also taking into account text-external factors, among which the identities of the participants to the conversation (Bhatia 2004). The difference between a conversation involving two expert speakers (specialized discourse) and a conversation between an expert speaker and a layman (popularized discourse) will be analyzed and the focus will be on the variation or the re-construction of the identity of the expert speaker according to the context variation.
In particular, attention is paid to the comparison of scenes in which lawyers communicate one single specialist content; but in the first case they do it to an expert person (e.g. other lawyers/judge) and in a second moment they convey it to a non-expert interlocutor (e.g. customers).
In this way the change in the language and how the ‘exclusion’ of the interlocutor from the discourse community affects the language are highlighted.
In addition to the definition of the genre ‘legal drama’, the final aim of the research is to answer the following questions:
1) Why and how can Special Languages be modified in mixed/embedded genres?
2) Which are the popularization strategies in legal drama?
By means of a corpus made of ‘official’ and ‘fan-made’ subtitled and dubbed Italian versions of three courtroom dramas (The Good Wife, Suits, Boston Legal), an analysis is carried out of the adaptation of culturally-bound elements, especially those concerning the US legal system (e.g. the organization of the US trial and the explanation of its phases or of concepts referred to in the Constitution). The aim of the analysis is to provide an overview of the choices made by the translators, with particular attention to the way specialized knowledge is negotiated and popularized for the non-expert, Italian audience, though taking account of the generic conventions of courtroom drama which contribute to the representation of the source culture into the target one.