Legal and LSP Linguistics and Translation: Asian Languages' Perspectives

This essay opens the Special Issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law dedicated to Asian Languages, entitled Legal and LSP Linguistics and Translation: Asian Languages' Perspectives. It focuses on revealing the principal issues discussed in the volume, by positioning the contributors' works into the general theoretical semiotic perspectives which shape legal languages, legal translation and public discourse over languages spoken in Asia. This volume of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law is composed of nine articles which may be grouped into four categories of problems. The first group in general refers to problems connected with legal communication both from interlingual and intralingual perspectives. Thus it encompasses four papers dealing with legal translation as well as communication in legal and political settings (Cao in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-16, 2018; Mannoni in Int J Semiot Law 32(1), 2018; Koptseva and Sitnikova in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-28, 2018; Alwazna in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-20, 2018). The second theme focuses on legal interpretation problems in Hong Kong (Leung in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-22, 2017) and is an important contribution due to the fact that the right to the interpreter and to communication in a language one understands in court proceedings is one of human rights nowadays and as the real life cases indicate is one of the rights which may be easily abused and no one apart from the victim and the interpreter actually may realise that that human right is not properly observed. Furthermore, the consequences of such abuse may have dire consequences for legal communication participants. The next paper, constituting a separate, third theme, is devoted to teaching legal translation and developing legal translators' competences from the very beginning (Halimi in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-8, 2018). The last category encompasses three papers devoted to the semiotic analysis of words and images aimed at achieving a specific persuasive result or proper understanding of similar but not identical concepts which may frequently be considered universal despite vital differences resulting from different historical, social or political evolution of societies and states (Xu in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-9, 2018; Abbas and Kadim in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-20, 2018; Haider and Olimy in Int J Semiot Law 32(1):1-32, 2018).