[Corpora-List] legal terminology and indigenous languages: clarification

[james L. fidelholtz]

Hi, Mamari,

I have not been involved in setting up corpora for specific fields,
but it seems (since no one has answered you yet) that the list may not
have anyone in that specific field. A couple of thoughts occur to me.
I don't know much about the NZ legal system, but they may well have
court interpreters for Maori. A quick Google gives perhaps 100,000
speakers of Maori, and if New Zealanders are like most Western
cultures, the Maori are severely disadvantaged culturally and
economically, and thus, for all the usual reasons, more likely to
appear in court (percentagewise) than 'whites'. If my suppositions are
correct, there should be ample legal transcripts of Maori with the
translators' translations, which could be at least a start for a
relevant corpus to begin extracting Maori legal term equivalents. If
you are Maori or know the Maori languages, or know speakers, then a
bit of brain-/tongue-/legwork and maybe some questionnaires could net
you further terms, or at least equivalent expressions. If there are
elders who might recall any of the native legal processes and terms,
then that would be another avenue. Native literature might be a less
fruitful source (but maybe native 'police novels'?). These are the
avenues that occur to me offhand that might be worth exploring.
Perhaps others would have even more fruitful suggestions. (Another
idea: check old archives, legislative records, etc., for a few Maori
paragraphs that might have crept in -- based on my experience in such
a (more general) search, this avenue would take a *lot* of scavenging
for just a few nuggets.)

Good luck.

Jim

On 1/22/08, Mamari Stephens <Mamari.Stephens at vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
> Greetings again...
>
> In my haste to get a message out I realised that I had been a little less than clear in my original request (see below)!   I am looking to design a corpus of (mainly written) texts from which to extract legal terminology from the most frequent content words.  The ultimate aim would be to create a legal dictionary of Maori legal terms, but the design of the corpus is the critical first step.  I have been looking at some of the diachronic corpora (eg the corpus of historical Welsh) but any nore ideas or observations by others on how they might have designed their corpus would be most useful. I am interested in hearing what pitfalls people have faced in designing such corpora, and what specific issues have been faced when dealing with a language struggling to survive the experience of colonisation.
>
> Thanks very much indeed
>
> Nga mihi
>
> Mamari
>
>
>
>
> Mamari Stephens
> Lecturer
> Te Kura Tatai Ture
> Faculty of Law
> Victoria of University
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mamari Stephens
> Sent: Sat 19/01/2008 03:25 PM
...
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>


-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y
     Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de
     Puebla, MÉXICO

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