Richard Powell is professor of English at Nihon University in Tokyo. His research interests include forensic linguistics; legal English; comparative legal culture; and cross-cultural pragmatics. He holds an MA in history from Cambridge, an MSc in politics from London (SOAS) and an MA in linguistics from Macquarie University, Sydney. He obtained the English solicitor’s qualification from the College of Law, London, while working as a trainee lawyer.
Richard has written books on language issues in legal contexts (the most recent being “Motivations for language choice in Malaysian courtrooms”, published by the University of Malaya) and on Asian Englishes, as well as textbooks on teaching law through English and articles on forensic linguistics and language planning.
2008: English through the News Media 2009 (with N. Miyamoto and N. Ito). Tokyo: Asahi Shuppan.
2009 (forthcoming): English in Asia, Asia in English. Seoul: Prounsoop.
Recent academic articles:
In press, 2008: ‘Bilingual courtrooms: in the interests of justice?’ Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics (Gibbons & Turrell, eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
In press, 2009: ‘The role of English in Southeast Asian legal systems.’ World Englishes: Problems - Properties - Prospects. (L. Siebers and T. Hoffmann eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Legal systems impose severe limitations on the extent to which communities can operate globally. While the concept of international law is an ancient one, in practice it has yet to involve much beyond a series of agreements made at government level. Many citizens are unfamiliar with the workings of their own legal systems, let alone those of other countries. Their sense of alienation when having to deal with a foreign legal system is predicated upon differences in language, legal procedure and social culture, and compounded by the fact that what brought them into contact with the law in the first place was disagreement with a local individual or company, or misunderstanding and perhaps deliberate violation of local norms.
Both Japan and Malaysia strive to convince the global community that, no matter what the particularities of their legal system, locals and foreigners will be treated with equal fairness. Primarily this entails making sufficient provision for proficient and accessible language translation, but it also involves recognition of cultural differences that might affect the way the words and behaviour of foreign suspects and litigants are perceived.
Japanese and Malaysian law differ considerably. In Japan, a system based on civil law has evolved in a largely monolingual society. In comparison, Malaysia’s largely common-law system might be expected to be better prepared for globalisation because the multicultural nature of Malaysian society has produced bilingual procedures and practitioners. But the convergences between Japan and Malaysia are more compelling than the divergences, with each society struggling to tackle linguistic and administrative burdens brought by a rising number of foreigners passing through its civil and especially criminal courts. This presentation, drawing from courtroom observations and interviews with legal practitioners and translators, will compare and contrast how each is responding to the challenge.