Agnieszka Kocel-Duraj

Assistant Professor at the University of Bielsko-Biała, Poland; linguist and sworn translator/interpreter, with specialization in legal translation and conference interpreting.

Agnieszka graduated from the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw in Poland, where she obtained her Ph.D. in historical phonology and discovered her present path. She has since completed two years of post-graduate training in conference interpretation, complimented with a few years of teaching experience acquired in Poland and England – places which may now lay claim both as her home, and to her heart.

Academically, her interests lie in two distinctly different disciplines; linguistics, dialectology and phonology, on the one hand; and jurislinguistics with contrastive studies, on the other. At the moment, Agnieszka’s focuses are on comparison of various countries’ legal systems, research related to legal entity differentiation, and insolvency and bankruptcy proceedings relative to Poland, Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia.

LingLex, a School of Legal English and translators’ office that Agnieszka set up to teach lawyers and business persons, offers workshops on various aspects of Legal English and provides various Legal English courses. She currently also writes an original Legal English coursebook, which is slated to publish in the near future. Personally, she has always held that doing what one loves for a living means living without ever having to work. Agnieszka cites her great passions as linguistic study, languages in general, English in preference, and Legal English in particular; assurance that her work efforts are done with regard to what she most deeply identifies with.