Performative Speech Acts in the Translation of Indonesian Legal Documents into English
Abstract
The aim of this research is to find out speech acts used in legal documents. To discuss the problems of this research, two theories are applied, namely, the translation theory of Newmark completed by the concept of pragmatic (for what purpose, to whom, when and where the legal documents are used), while for speech acts typology, Searle's theory is applied. The data used for this research were taken from 6 (six) legal documents in the form of employment contract, conciliation agreement, lease agreement, sales agreement, lease of resident and business place and lease of villa agreement. Based on the results of the analysis, it was found that from the five specific types of speech acts put forward by Searle and Cruse, only 4 (four) speech acts were found, namely, (1) representative, (2) directive, (3) comisive, and (4) declarative speech acts. While expressive speech act was not found in this research.
References
Austin, J. L. (1962). How To Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bach, K., & Harnish, R. M. (1979). Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Cao, D. (2007). Translating Law. Edited by S. Bassnett and E. Gentzler. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.multilingual-matters.com.
Cao, D., & Zhao, X. (2013) ‘Legal Translation at the United Nations’, in Legal Translation in Context.
Catford, J. C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation. London: Longman.
Cruse, A. D. (2000). Meaning and Language, An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fiorito, L. (2006). On Performative in Legal Discourse. Metalogicon, XIX(2), 101-112.
Grice, P. (1991). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Malmkjer, K. (2006). The Linguistics Encyclopedia. London: Routledge.
Nida, E., & Taber, C. R. (1969). The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: J. Brill. https://doi.org/10.2307/411434
Searle, J. R. (1979). Expression and Meaning: Essays in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609213
Trosborg, A. (1997). Text Typology and Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.26
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).