Dr Edward Clay PhD

• BA/Hons French and Linguistics – University of Sheffield
• MA Interpreting and Translation (French and Italian) – University of Bath
• PhD in Translation Studies – University of Birmingham

Edward Clay joined the Law School in 2025, where he began work on his current research project examining how the EU’s legal language has evolved since Brexit, adopting a mixed methods approach combining corpus linguistics and interview data, as well as investigating the implications of any changes for the policy and lawmaking environment of the EU and the UK.

Edward has a background in language and linguistics, having studied a BA in French and Linguistics and an MA in Interpreting and Translation. He has worked as a translator and interpreter for over a decade, specialising in legal translation. His PhD was an interdisciplinary project at the interface of law and language, translation and linguistics, leading to a thesis entitled ‘Translation-induced language change in the field of migration: a multilingual corpus analysis of EU legal texts and press articles.’

Edward’s research interests focus on empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to law and language, examining the intersection between translation, law, terminology and linguistics. His research examines the effects of translation on terminology in legal discourse, and legal translation as a language contact scenario. He has published articles in international journals on law and language and corpus methods for examining translated legal texts.