Slurp McDurp

The aim of our research is to analyze the phenomenon of “Plain Language” movement, specifically “Plain English” in both the linguistic and the sociolinguistic contexts. For hundreds of years, people have bemoaned the unintelligibility of legal documents and campaigned to make them clearer. Increasingly, that activity has been described as a movement—the “plain language movement”. The premise behind the plain English movement is that legal documents ought to be plainer - and more comprehensible - to the average person. In this paper we try to ascertain whether Plain English is applicable to the legal documents of any kind as is, and if not, what the underlying issues behind it are. To understand the topic at all, several concepts should be kept in mind, the few of which are socio-communicative system and sphere of language use . Socio-communicative system is a set of codes and subcodes used in any given linguistic community and interrelated in terms of functional comple...

In the article “ Plain Language Movement and Legal Translation : An AnalyticalStudy of Two Translations of a Contract of Lease from Arabic into English ”, Rafid Abdul explores the topic of simplifying the legal language in order to achieve a more comprehensive message, promoting the functional approach to translation. The author argues that the Plain Language movement has had great positive effect on the translation practices of legal documents. He calls for implementing changes to the way translation is being taught, suggesting that more focus should be added towards the functional approach. The author points out a peculiar contradiction: the layman cannot understand the language of legal texts, even though they are specifically aimed towards him. This fact caused the Plain Language movement to emerge. The research itself is based on the analysis of two translations of the lease contracts. The translations are regarded as the best of their kind and are used in Iraqi universitie...

In the article  "Some sociolinguistic concepts of black language"  by Orlando L. Taylor, the author delves into the topic of legitimacy of Black English as a social dialect and how it may be used in American classrooms. First, the author begins by stating that sociolinguists and black community leaders call for re-evaluation of significance of Standard English in American schools. The claim is backed by the excerpt from the Washington Post, according to which, the decision was made by the committee of therapists to no longer make any efforts to "correct" the dialectal peculiarities of black children, instead shifting the focus towards working on speech defects. Next, the author establishes a counterpoint by stating that the decision was not approved of unanimously. In particular, black community leaders in Chicago and Philadelphia argue that the committee’s decision is insulting to the black community, as it presumes that black children are not capable of lea...