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Language at Work in the Law

The Customs, Conventions, and Appellate Consequences of Court Reporting

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Language in the Judicial Process

Part of the book series: Law, Society and Policy ((LSPO,volume 5))

Abstract

Court reporters are charged by law with the duty of making verbatim transcriptions of legal proceedings. The necessary presumption behind this task is that an accurate record of an oral/acted event can be made by writing down exactly what was said. But in any movement from the oral to the written, certain discrepancies between the original event and its written representation are bound to occur, discrepancies which are traceable not merely to inherent differences between spoken and written language, but in the case of court reporting, to the cultural and professional climates in which reporters do their jobs. Perhaps most particularly, discrepancies occur because of the intersection of beliefs which reporters hold about language and about their profession.

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© 1990 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Walker, A.G. (1990). Language at Work in the Law. In: Levi, J.N., Walker, A.G. (eds) Language in the Judicial Process. Law, Society and Policy, vol 5. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3719-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3719-3_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-3721-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-3719-3

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