In legal language, metaphors are a fundamental way to express and apprehend abstract notions. For instance, responsibility is perceived as WEIGHT (“the burden of proof”), falsehood or unacceptability as a DECAYING LIVING BEING (“the fruit of the rotten tree”) or the law can be used as a WEAPON (“take the law into your own hands”, “use the law as a sword and not as a shield”). This has now been accepted by the academic community, which not only recognizes the value of metaphors in legal language, but has started to pay due attention to the way they operate, as witness the interesting contributions made in the field. However, this has not yet led to metaphors being incorporated as an important component of legal ESP. In our paper, we shall argue for the inclusion of metaphors in the teaching of Legal English and suggest a few sample exercises based on our teaching practice. Our intention is to prove the usefulness of this component within a complicated variety of ESP, where metaphors may both provide relief from other more intricate areas and also help learners to understand the concepts underlying such metaphors.

中文翻译：

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法律英语教学中隐喻意识的增强

用法律语言来说，隐喻是表达和理解抽象概念的基本方式。例如，责任被认为是重量（“举证责任”），虚假或不可接受性被认为是腐朽的生命（“烂树的果实”），或者法律可以用作武器（“将法律融入自己的双手”，“将法律当作剑而非盾牌”）。现在，这已被学术界所接受，学术界不仅认识到隐喻在法律语言中的价值，而且已开始对它们的操作方式给予应有的关注，以证明在该领域做出的有趣贡献。但是，这尚未导致隐喻被纳入法律ESP的重要组成部分。在我们的论文中 我们将主张在法律英语教学中加入隐喻，并根据我们的教学实践提出一些示例练习。我们的目的是证明该组件在各种复杂的ESP中的有用性，在这些ESP中，隐喻不仅可以缓解其他更复杂的领域，还可以帮助学习者理解隐喻的概念。