engleski

Legal English education at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb .

The aim of the paper is to briefly describe legal language education in Croatia on the example of the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb. At the Faculty of Law in Zagreb courses in Language for Legal Purposes (English or German) are compulsory for all students in the first and second year of study. Elective courses in Advanced Legal English and Comparative Legal Linguistics are offered in their fifth year of study. The vast majority of students take Legal English. Legal English is a complex area of study and it presents numerous difficulties to teachers and learners alike. Among those are polysemy, archaic words and phrases, long and complex sentences, borrowings from Latin and French, legal doublets, special usage of modal verbs and so on. It must also be taken into consideration that legal terms denote concepts and cannot be translated without at least basic understanding of the respective legal system. The main aim of the legal language courses is to improve their ability to use and understand legal texts written in English in their studies and later in their professional work, as well as to improve their translation skills and overall and specific language competence. For that purpose a new textbook has been prepared by the Department of Foreign Languages taking into account the needs of law students today.

legal English, education, curriculum development, legal linguistics

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