LEGAL ENGLISH IN RUSSIA

LEGAL ENGLISH IN RUSSIA
The main aim of this blog is to discuss matters of interest to Russian speakers who work with and draft legal documents in English, based on my experience of working as a legal editor, translator and English solicitor in a prominent Russian law firm.













30 November 2013

20 polite phrases the British use in correspondence, and what we really mean

This post may make a rod for my own back. After all, I use many if not all of the phrases I mention in it in my everyday correspondence. Now people will know my secrets!

Nonetheless, I’ve always believed that the British are usually pretty good at this type of thing. In this post, therefore, I list twenty commonly used phrases. I’ve added a helpful English to English translation to help you to deploy them properly.

It's all relavtive

Legal writing often involves a need to talk about how something relates to something else. And there are lots of phrases to help us do this when we draft legal texts.

If the wrong prepositions are used when these phrases are deployed, readers are likely to understand even so. Nonetheless, writing sounds more authoritative if you use the right ones, and generally that’s a quality that clients are pleased to perceive in their lawyers.

A duty to give reasons?

In some cases under English law, a decision-maker may be under a public law duty to give reason for any decision it takes. I’ve been a government lawyer, so have direct experience of jumping through hoops to make sure that no one has a real prospect of success should they rush off to court to challenge your actions on the grounds that they are unfair, fundamentally unreasonable (‘irrational’, as the case law puts it) or not taken for the proper legal reasons.

Of course, the work I do now is rather different and clearly I have no formal legal obligation to specify why I edit in a particular way. Nonetheless, when I revise legal texts in English, I consider that I should often try to explain myself.

Is everything under control?

People who study languages will be aware of the concept of the ‘false friend’, a word that may mean one thing in your own language but which, when used in another language, means something completely different. Occasionally these can be amusing: for instance, a Frenchman may be slightly bemused when foodstuffs are advertised in the UK as having no preservatives (i.e. no additives whose purpose is to delay the food in turning bad). ‘Why would one even think of adding preservatives?’ our hypothetical French friend may muse. In French, you see, a ‘préservatif’ is a condom.

I suspect that more of a problem, at least in legal drafting in English but relating to a foreign system of laws, is a word that has the same meaning but somehow doesn’t quite fit exactly. One of those words for documents produced in Russia is ‘control’.

28 November 2013

An example of Runglish

When I was in my early years at secondary school, the humorist Miles Kington produced a series of popular books based on his magazine columns in which he expounded on Franglais, a mix of French and English (e.g. “Kington présente 40 lessons hilarieux en des situations d'everyday "). Anyone who deals with English texts in Russia will encounter Runglish, a similar phenomenon but formed from Russian and English.

Common in this context are Russian grammatical structures that are otherwise alien to good written English but which take root in business writing in English about Russia. One such construction, in the context of a company’s directors or shareholders passing a formal corporate resolution, is ‘resolution on …’ or ‘to resolve on …’