Jean-Claude Gémar

Communication and culture mediation techniques in jurilinguistics

Communication means transferring information from one culture to another. This transfer of information leads to the conceptualization of a common and significant framework in legal discourse, especially in the translation, interpretation, and communication fields. Likewise, there is an increasing development and diversification of domain-specific knowledge across nations and cultures: “Culture . . . derives from historical experience – so do the forms that culture embraces, such as legal rules. It would be absurdly reductionist to see a rule simply as a rule” (Legrand 1996: 56). As a consequence, legal specialists in different subfields act as language and culture mediators to convey the correct contents of utterances and/or speech acts among their communities or for their clients. Jorge Luis Borges (1976) talks about a garden of forking paths, which means that communication is like a multistage dynamic (Wagner 2005) where mechanisms of transfer, of importation from one culture to another have to be fairly analyzed. The notion of importation and transfer does not only relate to the translation field but also to verbal and written speech. Active and collaborative work is then necessary to mediate, decide, and analyze under real constraints with cultural challenges. Accordingly, decision-making needs to elaborate multiple and viable solutions to problems that emerge naturally from ordinary language, and so to