• Sunniva WHITTAKER (Bergen, Norvège)
    Contrastive legal discourse research. Corpus design and applications
    2014, Vol. XIX-1, pp. 49-57

    This article discusses various types of bilingual French-Norwegian corpora within the field of law that the author has used in her research. Different corpus designs and applications are described with an emphasis on the specific challenges posed by legal discourse due to the culture bound nature of legal concepts, terms and discursive norms. The article describes both comparable and parallel corpora, both of which provide not only interesting avenues for further research but also valuable insight for the training of legal translators.


  • Sunniva WHITTAKER (Bergen, Norvège)
    La correspondance commerciale : apprentissage de stratégies discursives en langue étrangère
    (Commercial correspondence: learning discursive strategies in a foreign language)
    2001, Vol. VI-2, pp. 95-102

    This article focusses on the acquisition of discourse strategies by foreign students learning French. The study is based on a corpus of business letters written by Norwegian students. Our aim is to demonstrate how many of the mistakes that occur in this particular genre are due to the fact that even advanced students tend to misinterpret discourse contexts and as a consequence, fail to choose the correct discours strategy. Whereas grammatical mistakes will be considered by the addressee as being due to a poor command of the language and therefore easily forgiven, a bad choice of discourse strategy will often be interpreted as a manifestation of impoliteness or servility.