Language of treaties - language of power relations?

This chapter introduces a case study in which the methods of corpus research were applied to the study of bilateral treaties. Lexical corpus tools such as keyword lists and concordances were used for a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of Finnish-Soviet treaties. The aim was to discover whether the language of treaties reveals something about the power relations of the parties. This research question was approached by searching for elements of typical Soviet discourse in treaties concluded at a time when the Soviet Union was at the peak of its power, as the underlying hypothesis was that the Soviet Union had a somewhat dominant position in the treaty negotiations of that time, and thus much of the treaty text was translated from Russian into Finnish. The language of treaties belongs to the realm of legal language and, while it also intersects with political language, it is nevertheless expected to be highly standardised and neutral. However, the analysis showed that the Finnish-Soviet treaties do not form an entirely homogenous group of texts and that features of typical Soviet language use were indeed present in the treaties. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the findings and the possible reasons behind them. This chapter deals with research that taps into the connection between language and political relations through the study of interstate treaties. It describes the application of corpus-based methods in the study of treaty language, introduces the Parallel Electronic Corpus of State Treaties (PEST) corpus of treaties, and presents one case study performed on Finnish-Soviet corpus material. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states that when a treaty has been authenticated in two or more languages, the text is equally authoritative in each language, unless the treaty stipulates or the parties agree otherwise. The language used in treaties is governed by official instructions and guidelines. The PEST corpus is a collection of aligned bitexts for bilateral treaties and multilingual aligned documents for international conventions. The lexis of treaties consists mainly of contract terminology and vocabulary related to the topics of agreement.