Vagueness in legal language: a contrastive analysis of the Chinese and Italian legal terms of agency law

• Michele Mannoni ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Verona

     University of Verona

     Verona, Italia

     
• Localización: Archivio glottologico italiano, ISSN 0004-0207, Vol. 106, Nº. 2, 2021, págs. 222-261
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • “Inter-lingual uncertainty” is a term first used by Deborah Cao to refer to the “uncertainty [that] arises when two languages are considered or when one language is translated into another language.” { ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"4TowVzA6","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2007a, 71)","plainCitation":"(2007a, 71)","dontUpdate":true,"noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":863,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/2215504/items/DWVG2KW6"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/2215504/items/DWVG2KW6"],"itemData":{"id":863,"type":"article-journal","container-title":"Journal of Pragmatics","issue":"39","page":"69-83","title":"Interlingual Uncertainty in Bilingual and Multilingual Law","author":[{"family":"Cao","given":"Deborah"}],"issued":{"date-parts": [["2007"]]}},"locator":"71","label":"page","suppressauthor":true}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"}}. After Cao’s study focussing on bilingual and multilingual law, few studies on the topic have appeared. This study aims to provide a contribution to the field by studying the uncertainty arising from a monolingual law such as that of China when its terminology is interpreted against Italian. It exemplifies the uncertainty of the use of two key-terms such as wěituō 委托 and dàilǐ 代理 and their compounds, such as wěituō dàilǐ rén 委托代理⼈, as used in the Chinese law of agency with respect to the Italian legal-linguistic context. Basing on data retrieved from different sources including digital online law repositories, text repositories and an off-line corpus of Chinese laws, this study shows that these Chinese legal terms are more semantically obscure than their Italian ‘equivalents’. It proposes that the intralingual uncertainty of the source language is further enhanced by the requisites of perspicuity of the target language. It argues that when linguistic uncertainty is not intentional and the terminology of the target language is less uncertain than that of the source language, it has to be resolved in cross-linguistic interpretation.