Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

25judgments. He argues that knowledge about textual conventions is fundamental in thesearch of appropriate translation equivalents.Recently, Vesterager (2010) compared Danish and Spanish judgments in termsof their move structure and rhetorical strategies so as to better understand the challengesthat the translation of judgments pose to translators. She reached the conclusion thatDanish and Spanish texts display many similarities (Vesterager 2010: 221):[...] they share the same purposes of the analysed moves and use some of thesame rhetorical strategies to comply with these purposes. For instance bothlanguages use legal terminology to help place the judgment in its propercontext, and their choice of verbs and grammatical tense supports the purpose ofthe moves. Moreover, in order to be able to express something of generalvalidity, both languages prefer the impersonal writing style. Furthermore, inDanish as well as in Spanish the conclusion of the judgment is traditionallyinitiated by a standard formula, doubtless with the purpose of ensuring the legaleffect of the document.However, the comparison of Danish and Spanish judgments also revealed a fewdifferences in the move structure. Danish judgments include larger parts of the co-text(information about the text) whereas the Spanish judgments only include the conclusionreached by the previous court instance (move one). Spanish judgments include moreinformation in move four (e.g. information on appeal opportunities, payment of thecounsel‘s fee and confirmation of the judgment) than Danish judgments. The maindifferences between the texts are related to syntax (e.g. sentence length and syntacticcomplexity measured by degree of subordination) and to the lexicon (mainly legalterminology and lexical variation). According to the author, the translation of Spanishjudgments into Danish is challenging due to these differences.In contrast with Engberg (1993) and Vesterager (2010), who compare judgmentsproduced within the same legal system (Civil Law), in this research we propose tocompare judgments produced within two different legal systems, i.e. Portuguese