A presença de termos do discurso jurídico em sites institucionais: discutindo acessibilidade textual e terminológica no âmbito do direito do consumidor

Abstract

Consumer Law (DC), regulated by the Consumer Protection Code (Law No. 8,078/1990), is focused on regulatory actions of the consumer relationship, whose concern falls on the vulnerable party in this process, the consumer. In this perspective, this research has as its object of study the legal terminology, which is used in specialized texts to describe legal concepts and norms. This makes legal language a specialized being, therefore, a particular way of communication within a specialized universe, which can be studied by Terminology, which is a field of linguistic studies of specialized discourse. Although contact with the specialized discourse of Consumer Law is not made only by specialists or experts in the Law, it is important to understand the lay reader as an important part of this universe, a part understood, even, as fundamental. Considering this, the language ends up being used in various texts that, in theory, are intended for the lay public. Failure to take care of this audience can compromise the understanding of the information contained and even the right to defense in business relationships, being deprived of their basic rights. A highlight in this context are the websites of associations and institutions linked to consumer law. Thus, the present work is based on the assumption that the writing of news on this theme should have a clearer and more simplified character, in order to reach different audiences. Against the backdrop of this issue, in the present work, the objective is to make a descriptive analysis of the presence of legal terms in open and open access institutional websites. It is considered the hypothesis that citizens use these institutional sites as a form of research to learn about this area and guarantee their rights, a fact that should be taken into account by associations and bodies related to consumer rights. Another point considered is the fact that the sites are freely accessible, so they are available to the entire population, a fact that is directly linked to a relevant social movement, which is the approximation of society with specialized knowledge, or, in other words, the popularization of science. However, this absence of simplifying mechanisms can be an obstacle in this regard. This research is based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the Communicative Theory of Terminology (Cabré, 1999) and the discussions on Textual and Terminological Accessibility (ATT) (Finatto; Paraguassu, 2021), theoretical approaches that underpin a linguistic understanding of the scientific and technical discourse of the different areas of human knowledge. And towards the analysis of specialized texts, the work is based on the discussions of Textual Terminology (Ciapuscio, 1999, 2003), Hoffman (2015) and Cabré (2002), which gave support to think about the notion of specialized text and its circulation in different contexts. Based on these foundations, 227 texts from institutional websites in the area of consumer law were selected and treated in a computer program and analyzed qualitatively. The results show that the websites of government agencies and social organizations still lack a policy of access to knowledge in the area, considering that their websites and published texts do not renounce a hermetic terminology that is suitable for highly specialized contexts.