yndigo

Noun and verb forms in legal writing

Nominalization, an issue I had touched on in my post about language contraction in English, is also the subject of a few of Wayne Schiess’ recent posts. He asserts that, although it is very common for lawyers unsure of their English style to use strong nouns and weak verbs, it is unnatural in English.

Translators especially should be on the lookout for nouns that would sound better as verbs; this is something I find myself correcting frequently in translations. Many languages are simply more nominal than our own and because we tend to unwittingly borrow the source language’s syntax when we translate, we come out with: “he performed the review”; “she undertook the decision”; “they committed the misappropriation of the funds.” Translatorese of this sort should be be anglicized and shortened: “he reviewed,” “she decided,” “they misappropriated the funds.”

Margaret Marks, in her wonderful translation blog ponders nominalizations in German. Many other Indo-European languages nominalize verbs — often with the use of inflections — as do Japanese and Chinese by using particles. Alas, nominalizations are not only a human issue; the machine translation community has also recognized them as an obstacle.

English, of course, has plenty of its own verbs and adjectives that can be used as nouns. Many are fine as is, but translators should correct nominalizations that unnaturally slow the native sounding flow of English, rendering it, at best, stiff and formal and, at worst, nearly unintelligible.