Understanding the subtleties of EU legal language: the contribution of Corpus Linguistics and Corpus-based Translation Studies to university courses of Legal English

In today’s globalised world, Law students are increasingly faced with job opportunities within international organisations and multinational companies that require an excellent competence of English at a specialised level. Innovative ways of making students engage with the subtleties of legal are proposed in the present chapter. The proposed method applies tools and concepts from the fields of Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies in the study of legal language. The analyses takes European Union legal terms as an example to show how the examination of monolingual comparable corpora and bilingual parallel corpora can bring to light the specific features that differentiate EU legal language from national legal language. As well as representing an innovative way for Law students to deal with legal vocabulary, work on corpora also provides students with competence in corpus compilation and analysis that can be transferred to other areas in their future work.