Characteristic features of adapted legal text

Studies of adapted (or simplified) legal texts are called by a great necessity among people without legal education. Plain English Campaign is becoming more and more popular abroad in the legal sphere. UNO and European Union start to issue their documents and legal acts in Plain English. In Russia such research also has practical and theoretical importance for writing documents and developing text linguistics. Adapted legal text is viewed as secondary text. They can be divided into two types according to the theory of communication, namely text-copies and text-reactions. This paper analyzes structural, semantic, discourse and pragmatic characteristics of adapted texts. Adapted texts state the meaning of terms, corelations of terms within a terminology system for non-specialists. Adapted text shapes scientific world map for a non-specialist. The source-text has legal power to state laws and measures of punishment for their breaking. Adapted text has a different pragmatics. It is aimed at explaining the law and informing the reader. Source-text and adapted text can exist in one discourse or in different discourses.

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