Cohesion in Legalese, with Special Reference to a United Nations Document and its Translated Version

Abstract

This study is a qualitative analysis testing the validity and applicability of Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan’s model of cohesion (1976) to texts written in legalese. This validity check is carried out by applying the model to five excerpts from a well-written United Nations document, namely the United Nations Convention against Corruption (2004), the UNCAC, being a representative of legal texts, with the aim of exploring the text’s lexical and grammatical cohesive relations and finally deciding if certain modifications are needed to be proposed to the 1976 cohesion taxonomy to ensure its FULL applicability to legal texts. The study’s contribution to text analysis lies not only in enhancing the understanding of the challenges faced when applying the 1976 model to the legal context, but also in deducing the modifications which the model requires and this, in turn, fills a number of unbridged gaps which are found in the existing literature on cohesion. The study’s major goal is to propose an INTEGRATED model of cohesion that combines both the cohesive devices of the 1976 model applicable to the legal discourse in addition to the proposed amendments. A second major contribution lies in the study’s investigation of the translation techniques used to translate cohesive devices from English into Arabic which seeks to investigate how texture and integration are achieved in the target (translated) version of the UNCAC and how it is a well-connected text rather than a series of separate or unrelated sentences.