Reescrita jurídica à luz do Plain English Movement: uma tradução intralinguística

Abstract

This bachelor’s thesis aims to analyze the effectiveness of legal rewriting, based on the Plain English Movement, as a practice of intralingual translation, suggesting the role of the professional translator as an agent promoting access to justice. The starting point is the premise that traditional legal language is characterized by verbosity, the use of archaisms, and technical terminology (legalese), hindering comprehension by the lay readers, compromising the principle of access to Justice. In line with this objective, this study presents an intralingual translation into English of a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, applying the principlesof the Plain English Movement, thereby demonstrating its effectivenessas a strategy for making legal texts more accessible. The theoretical framework is based on Jakobson's concept of intralingual translation, the principles of the Plain English Movement proposed by Wydick, Garner, Goldstein, and Lieberman, and the functionalist approach of Christiane Nord. This study adopts a qualitative approach, developed in four stages: corpus selection, textual analysis, intralingual translation, and commented translation. The results indicate that lexical simplification, textual restructuring, and the replacement of archaisms constitute effective strategies for improving the comprehensibility of legal texts without compromising their integrity. It can be concluded that legal intralingual translation represents a promising field for translators, although it requires specialized training.