Written pleadings before the ECtHR : Genre description and text-organising patterns

This book lies in the field of Genre Studies and Legal Translation Studies. It aims at filling in a gap on the language and structure of the occluded genre of written pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights, concentrating on the linguistic building blocks used as text-organizing patterns to provide a stable matrix for this genre. The study does not aim at an exhaustive description but rather at signalling the structural and distributional tendencies in written pleadings. The practical goal underlying this short book is to raise awareness of the generic profile and phraseological peculiarities of written observations that become a challenging issue in compilation and translation of written pleadings by legal practitioners and legal translators. The analysis is carried out on three subcorpora of authentic texts: (a) pleadings translated from Russian into English, (b) pleadings translated from Italian into English and (c) pleadings originally drafted in English. The results contain an indication of text-organising patterns used as building block in this genre, obtained in a translational and phraseological perspective. On the theoretical level, the book supplements the rather scant information about the language and genre of written pleadings at the European Court of Human Rights. On the practical level, the results are oriented at legal practitioners who have to draft such documents and may be of use to Russian-to-English and Italian-to-English legal translators. On a more general level, the book may be useful for the researchers interested in the language of human rights and the linguistic regime of the European Court of Human Rights.