Research On The Popularization Of Civil Judicial Language In China

With the improvement of citizens' legal awareness,the number of civil lawsuits has increased year by year.Meanwhile,more and more ordinary citizens have directly participated in judicial practice without commissioning lawyers.In this process,the particularity of legal language brings litigation obstacles to citizens,so there are some questions—whether citizens need to know legal language,what legal language citizens need to know,and how to make citizens know legal language.In order to answer the above questions,this paper applies both empirical and theoretical research methods.Empirical research includes questionnaire survey and corpus collection of trial to understand the operation status of civil judicial language.This paper takes civil law and legal language as the main line of research,and also involves communication theory and other related knowledge,which needs interdisciplinary theoretical application.Therefore,the theoretical research covers these three fields,supporting the value and mode of the popularization of civil judicial language in China.The paper consists of three parts.The first part clarifies the need for the popularization of civil judicial language.The statistical analysis and textual analysis of the results of questionnaire surveys and corpus collection confirmed the high proportion of citizens who did not entrust lawyers when participating in litigation in civil cases.It is found that citizens encounter great legal language barriers in both the filing stage and the trial stage,and they are unfamiliar with some high-frequency judicial language,which to a certain extent affects the judicial efficiency and credibility,causing citizens to feel that they are opposed to the judicial system and the government.This is also the embodiment of language power inequality.Citizens should have the right to understand and use the civil judicial language.The popularization of the civil judicial language is of great importance and necessity.The second part elaborates the current status of the operation of civil judicial language mainly from the four stages of court hearings.Because China now adopts the mixed litigation mode of inquisitorial doctrine as the main and adversary doctrine as the auxiliary,judges mainly use procedural legal language in civil litigation,and seldom use substantive legal language.Procedural legal language is of universal value because of its limited number and less difficulty in understanding.However,civil judicial language barrier appears in the legal practice of citizens at present,which is caused by the absence of civil judicial language information database,the confusion of the use of civil judicial language by legal workers and other practical reasons.The third part gives some suggestions to popularize the civil judicial language.On the one hand,we should set up a reasonable goal of language popularization.It is necessary to consider from the angel of citizens,as well as to define the scope of civil judicial language that citizens need to know and to establish civil judicial language information database,which can lay a scientific foundation for its popularization.On the other hand,we need to learn from the experience and lessons of the law popularization movement,to give full play to the collaborative popularization function of all sectors of society,and to avoid the adverse impact of mass media.The measure of popularizing civil judicial language is a much broad proposition,which needs to be further explored on the basis of more scholars' attention.Therefore,the specific details are not fully developed in this part.