Cross-cultural communication - a challenge to English for legal purposes

This paper explores some issues of relevance to ESP practitioners by focusing on one problematic area, namely that of English for Law. Reference is made to the resources that are available for classroom teaching and legal translation, namely certain textbooks, dictionaries and glossaries. The main point of this article is that apart from the scarcity of these books on the Romanian market in comparison with, for example, the economic ones, the Legal English practitioner faces the challenge of providing not only an accurate translation but also a comprehensible one for a certain target reader whose expectancies relate to the system of law he/she comes from. The aim of this study is to offer several suggestions for an efficient use of Legal English textbooks, for improving the quality of dictionaries and glossaries, as well as to suggest some ways of coping with the translation in the field of law. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Huseyin Uzunboylu