(Nie)przekładalność języków. Analiza korpusowa opinii sądowo-psychiatrycznych
The (Un)Translatability of Languages: A Corpus Analysis of Forensic Psychiatric Reports

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents challenges faced by psychiatrists who venture into the justice system. Based on the analysis of sixty-five forensic psychiatric reports, strategies assumed by expert witnesses in order to reconcile the language of medicine with the language of law were reconstructed. Methods and tools of corpus linguistics were used, such as: frequency lists, keyword analysis, and concordance analysis. The results indicate that forensic psychiatrists have difficulty in translating the language of medicine into the language of law. They use lexis and linguistic structures characteristic of medical genres, while appropriating legal vocabulary in the form of phrases drawn from the criminal code. The tensions resulting from the collision of the legal and the psychiatric discourse have been described in terms of the clash of two types of logic: “either/or”, typical of the justice system, and “both/and”, prevalent in contemporary clinical psychiatry. This analysis has also captured ethical challenges which stem from the double role of forensic psychiatrists as doctors and as representatives of the criminal justice system. It has shown that psychiatrists focused on playing the latter role, situating themselves on the side of the law.

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