Lucja Biel | University of Warsaw (original) (raw)

Papers by Lucja Biel

Routledge eBooks, Nov 9, 2022

TRANSLATION BEYOND TRANSLATION STUDIES

Language and Law, 2018

The objective of this chapter is, first, to identify key terms in EU Competition Law in English a... more The objective of this chapter is, first, to identify key terms in EU Competition Law in English and, secondly, to identify and examine their collocational environment via the corpus methodology. The first part of the chapter presents a theoretical background on EU English as a supranational variety of English due to the increased mediation of content through translators and non-native English-speaking authors. The chapter next discusses the role of collocations, focusing on collocations of legal terms and collocations in EU English. Section 4 describes the EU Competition Corpus (1.5 million words), comprised of EU legislation, case law and “praxis” documents on Competition Law. The corpus was used to extract term-node candidates (103 terms). Their collocational environment was analysed through words sketches and concordances in Sketch Engine and WordSmith. The analysis has focused on the following aspects of collocations: semantic prosodies, collocational ranges (combinatory potential), derivational productivity, international prefixes, Latinisms, premodification by –ing and –ed participles, adjectives with negative connotations, deverbal and deadjectival nouns and an atypical grammatical behaviour of certain patterns. Last but not least, the chapter draws attention to a high variation of terminology and phraseology at various levels, which contributes to the hybridity of EU English

Rocznik Przekładoznawczy, 2017

Revista de Llengua i Dret - Journal of Language and Law, 2017

The objective of the paper is to propose a multi-perspective and multi-method research framework ... more The objective of the paper is to propose a multi-perspective and multi-method research framework for legal translation by modelling key dimensions and factors applicable to legal translation. As a result of the ongoing expansion of Legal Translation Studies, the field is experiencing a methodological development, which extends our perspective on legal translation. The paper proposes four postulates for the multi-perspective framework for researching legal translation — namely, transdisciplinarity, multidimensionality, bidirectionality, and multimethodology. The multi-perspective research framework for legal translation embraces a continuum of four key dimensions of translation — the product itself, the context of production and reception, process and participants, modelled according to their dominant factors, components and related methods of research. The second part of the paper investigates, by way of illustration, how corpus methods interact with the above proposed multi-perspec...

Over the last decade EU institutions have raised the profile of quality, as evidenced by an incre... more Over the last decade EU institutions have raised the profile of quality, as evidenced by an increased number of translation policies and guidelines. The objective of the chapter is to identify the quality parameters of EU translation by synthesizing and evaluating institutional policies and practices on the one hand and the academic literature on the other hand. Two interrelated dimensions will be distinguished: the quality of translation at the textual level and the quality of processes in translation service provision. The former covers two dimensions — equivalence and textual fit/clarity while the latter covers the management of people, processes and resources, as well as the availability of translations. One of the promising developments is the reframing of quality discourse by the explicit linking of translation quality at the textual level to genre clusters, with a shift of focus from equivalence to clarity. On the other hand, such classifications may be seen as being triggere...

Lucja Biel teaches and researches legal translation in the Department of Translation Studies and ... more Lucja Biel teaches and researches legal translation in the Department of Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication, University of Gdańsk, Poland. She has been a freelance translator since 1997 as well as a sworn translator. She is a graduate of Jagiellonian University (MA in Translation), Gdańsk University (Ph.D. in Linguistics), School of American Law (Chicago-Kent School of Law and University of Gdańsk) and University of Cambridge Diploma in an Introduction to English Law and the Law of the EU.

Między Oryginałem a Przekładem, 1970

Translation of EU law versus the central concepts of Translation Studies The objective of the pap... more Translation of EU law versus the central concepts of Translation Studies The objective of the paper was: (1) to analyse EU translation in light of central concepts of Translation Studies, and (2) to attempt a synthesis of numerous studies on EU translation to describe its distinctive features. EU law is adopted in 24 official languages and is applied in 28 Member States. The translation of EU law has an authoritative status. Owing to a complex array of political, procedural, legal and institutional factors, the translation of EU law poses a challenge to central TS concepts, such as a source text and a target text (versus language versions), a translation process (translation as part of a multistage and multilingual drafting

The typology of texts may raise the translator's awareness of text functions *a fu.ilitate th... more The typology of texts may raise the translator's awareness of text functions *a fu.ilitate the choice of transtation strategies. The term genre/text type refers to "the specific classes of texts characteristic of i giv"n scientific community or professional group and distinguished from each other by certain featureś of vocabulary form and style' which are wholly function-specific and conventional in nature" (Alcaraz and Hughes iOOZ, l0l). Il is generally ackn-owledged that legal texts con-

Quality has been on translation scholars’ minds since the emergence of Translation Studies (TS) a... more Quality has been on translation scholars’ minds since the emergence of Translation Studies (TS) as a discipline in the 1970s, with one of the seminal monographs by Juliane House being published in 1977. More recently, with TS shifting its focus to integrate non-literary texts more broadly (cf. Rogers 2015), the quality aspect has been researched across various specialized fields and genres. One of these fields is Institutional Translation, where the quest for product and process quality underlies the raison d’être of in-house translation teams. This field requires further in-depth research into quality aspects to combine and crossfertilize theory and practice. The purpose of this collective monograph is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretica...

Law, Language and the Courtroom, 2021

The judicial English Eurolect: a genre profiling of CJEU judgments Łucja Biel, Dariusz Koźbiał, D... more The judicial English Eurolect: a genre profiling of CJEU judgments Łucja Biel, Dariusz Koźbiał, Dariusz Müller

Terminology, 2020

The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supranational terms related to ... more The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supranational terms related to consumer protection transfer into domestic legal systems of three English-language jurisdictions (the UK, Ireland and Malta) during the transposition of EU directives. Transposition is a process of incorporating EU directives into national law and capturing supranational terms during their entry into national legal systems. We adopt a mixed-method approach of corpus linguistics and legal analysis of terms, working with a corpus of five directives and their UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts. Distinguishing between a term and a concept level, we propose a categorisation of transfer techniques arranged along a cline from foreignization to domestication. They involve imports, modifications (non-denominative and denominative variants), localisations and zero transfer both at the term level and the concept level.

Research Methods in Legal Translation and Interpreting, 2019

Corpus-Based Research in Legal and Institutional Translation, 2019

This paper explores the formulaicity of EU translations into Polish across four institutional gen... more This paper explores the formulaicity of EU translations into Polish across four institutional genres (legislation, judgments, reports, websites) with reference to the corresponding EU English corpora in order to understand how the degree of formulaicity is affected by the variable of genre. Formulaicity is operationalised as lexical bundles – high-frequency multi-word sequences (Biber and Barbieri 2007). The study shows a strong correlation between formulaicity and genres, as well as multiple facets of formulaicity (e.g. tokens vs. types). Our findings generally confirm the increased aggregate formulaicity of translations as regards bundle tokens for all EU genres, except for judgments, and the increased variation of bundles (types) for all the genres at the 40 occurrences per million words (pmw) threshold, although the “micro-formulaicity” threshold yielded inconclusive results. Another finding reveals a consistently low overlap of bundles between translations and non-translations....

Comparative Legilinguistics, 2013

Studies in Language, Culture and Society, 2014

The book is one of the few in-depth investigations into the nature of EU legal translation and it... more The book is one of the few in-depth investigations into the nature of EU legal translation and its impact on national legal languages. It is also the first attempt to characterise EU Polish, a language of supranational law and a hybrid variant of legal Polish emerging via translation. The book applies Chesterman’s concept of textual fit, that is how translations differ from non-translations, to demonstrate empirically on large corpora how the Polish eurolect departs from the conventions of legal and general Polish both at the macrostructural and the microstructural level. The findings are juxtaposed with the pre-accession version of Polish law to track the «Europeanisation» of legal Polish – recent changes brought about by the unprecedented inflow of EU translations.

The paper presents an overview of the EN 15038:2006 standard, Translation services— Service requi... more The paper presents an overview of the EN 15038:2006 standard, Translation services— Service requirements, and analyses its implications for the translation industry and specialised translator training in tertiary education institutions. It is the first pan-European standard which addresses the quality of the translation process specifically and establishes translation service requirements. Among other things, it establishes an independent third-party revision as an obligatory component of the translation process. Its significance for the translation industry is that it raises its profile as one of the standardised industries and contributes to the professionalisation of the translator and, more importantly, the reviser. With the growing number of translation agencies seeking to obtain the 15038:2006 certification, the standard gains increasingly wider recognition, which exerts certain pressure on educational institutions. It promotes a broader view of translation as part of the tran...

Routledge eBooks, Nov 9, 2022

TRANSLATION BEYOND TRANSLATION STUDIES

Language and Law, 2018

Rocznik Przekładoznawczy, 2017

Revista de Llengua i Dret - Journal of Language and Law, 2017

Między Oryginałem a Przekładem, 1970

Law, Language and the Courtroom, 2021

Terminology, 2020

Research Methods in Legal Translation and Interpreting, 2019

Corpus-Based Research in Legal and Institutional Translation, 2019

Comparative Legilinguistics, 2013

Studies in Language, Culture and Society, 2014

Research Methods in Legal Translation and Interpreting: Crossing Methodological Boundaries, 2019

The field of legal translation and interpreting has strongly expanded over recent years. As it ha... more The field of legal translation and interpreting has strongly expanded over recent years. As it has developed into an independent branch of Translation Studies, this book advocates for a substantiated discussion of methods and methodology, as well as knowledge about the variety of approaches actually applied in the field. It is argued that, complex and multifaceted as it is, legal translation calls for research that might cross boundaries across research approaches and disciplines in order to shed light on the many facets of this social practice. The volume addresses the challenge of methodological consolidation, triangulation and refinement. The work presents examples of the variety of theoretical approaches which have been developed in the discipline and of the methodological sophistication which is currently being called for. In this regard, by combining different perspectives, they expand our understanding of the roles played by legal translators and interpreters, who emerge as linguistic and intercultural mediators dealing with a rich variety of legal texts; as knowledge communicators and as builders of specialised knowledge; as social agents performing a socially situated activity; as decision-makers and agents subject to and redefining power relations, and as political actors shaping legal cultures and negotiating cultural identities, as well as their own professional identity.

https://www.crcpress.com/Research-Methods-in-Legal-Translation-and-Interpreting-Crossing-Methodological/Biel-Engberg-Ruano-Sosoni/p/book/9781138492103

Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law, 2014

Lost in the Eurofog, 2014

Quality aspects in institutional translation, 2017

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house tran... more The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), with its 1,500 in-house translators, produces yearly over 2 million pages of institutional translation and multilingual law. Over the last years, the mounting pressure for cost-efficiency has triggered a detailed scrutiny of all workflow processes and led to staff reductions combined with an increased use of outsourcing. This chapter presents how DGT has put in place a corporate quality management policy, approaching quality not only as product quality but also as quality of processes. It describes how focus on needs and expectations naturally led to highlighting the key role of purpose for text production, defining translation quality as fitness-for- purpose, in line with applicable standards. Furthermore, it shows how DGT in order to operationalise this definition addressed various other issues and ques- tions. The outcome was translation quality guidelines outlining the communicative purposes of different text categories and the risks involved. In the implementation of the guidelines, there has been a perceived tension between the fitness-for-purpose concept and high quality, on the one hand, and between the fitness-for-purpose concept and the traditional fidelity paradigm, on the other. The paper analyses why this tension is only apparent and why the fitness-for-purpose concept better than the traditional fidelity concept caters for the needs of the institutional translation and multilingual law-making that takes place in the European context.

Svoboda, Tomáš, Łucja Biel, Krzysztof Łoboda (eds) (2017) Quality Aspects in Institutional Transl... more Svoboda, Tomáš, Łucja Biel, Krzysztof Łoboda (eds) (2017) Quality Aspects in Institutional Translation. Berlin: Language Science Press, http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/181 (open access). The purpose of this volume is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretical background for discussing quality on the one hand, and chapters exploring selected aspects of quality and case studies from both academics and practitioners on the other. Our aim is to present these two approaches as a breeding ground for testing one vis-à-vis the other. This book studies institutional translation mostly through the lens of the European Union (EU) reality, and, more specifically, of EU institutions and bodies, due to the unprecedented scale of their multilingual operations and the legal and political importance of translation. Thus, it is concerned with the supranational (international) level, deliberately leaving national and other contexts aside. Quality in supranational institutions is explored both in terms of translation processes and their products – the translated texts.

Quality aspects in institutional translation, 2017

The purpose of this volume is to explore key issues, approaches and challenges to quality in institutional translation by confronting academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives. What the reader will find in this book is an interplay of two approaches: academic contributions providing the conceptual and theoretical background for discussing quality on the one hand, and chapters exploring selected aspects of quality and case studies from both academics and practitioners on the other. Our aim is to present these two approaches as a breeding ground for testing one vis-à-vis the other.

This book studies institutional translation mostly through the lens of the European Union (EU) reality, and, more specifically, of EU institutions and bodies, due to the unprecedented scale of their multilingual operations and the legal and political importance of translation. Thus, it is concerned with the supranational (international) level, deliberately leaving national and other contexts aside. Quality in supranational institutions is explored both in terms of translation processes and their products – the translated texts.

Ph.D. dissertation (2004) on conceptualisations of social and psychological distance in interpres... more Ph.D. dissertation (2004) on conceptualisations of social and psychological distance in interpresonal relations in English and Polish. Methodology - cognitive linguistics and contrastive linguistics

https://lingualegis.ils.uw.edu.pl/index.php/lingualegis/article/view/29/27

"Mac Aodha, Máirtín (ed.) (2014). Legal Lexicography. A Comparative Perspective. Farnham: Ashgate... more "Mac Aodha, Máirtín (ed.) (2014). Legal Lexicography. A Comparative Perspective. Farnham: Ashgate" The Journal of Specialised Translation 25, January 2016, 280-284, http://www.jostrans.org/issue25/rev_aodha.pdf

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, May 2014

Legal Translator as a Communicator. A review of Borja Albi, Anabel and Fernando Prieto Ramos (eds... more Legal Translator as a Communicator. A review of Borja Albi, Anabel and Fernando Prieto Ramos (eds): Legal
Translation in Context. Professional Issues and Prospects: Series New Trends in Translation Studies, 2013, Peter Lang, Oxford, Vol. 4, 315 pp

Comparative Legilinguistics, 2012

Comparative Legilinguistics. International Journal for Legal Communication, 2010

Yearbook of Phraseology, 2011

EST Congress, 2019

Panel at the 13 th EST Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa 9-13 September 2019 What does quali... more Panel at the 13 th EST Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa 9-13 September 2019 What does quality mean in legal translation and interpreting, and why does it matter? What is required of academic programmes, trainees and trainers in order to ensure effective legal translator training? What are the latest professional developments and limitations in legal translation and interpreting practice? How are practitioners and academics integrating new technological resources in their work, and how do these advances impact translation processes and products? What are the implications for the recognition of legal translators and interpreters? This panel aims to examine these and other related questions in line with the conference's theme and previous holistic approaches to legal translation. It will consider decision-making parameters (process) as a yardstick for building competence (people) and assessing translation adequacy (product) (Prieto Ramos 2015). These aspects will be explored from various angles by experts in Legal Translation Studies (LTS), with emphasis on: ▪ topics related to the central sub-headings of the conference (people, processes and products), including issues of legal translation problem-solving (e.g. legal asymmetries in terminology management and comparative legal analysis for translation), communicative adequacy in legal translation, professional profiles and working conditions, training challenges and models, quality indicators and metrics, quality assurance policies; ▪ contextualisation of transfer processes between or within jurisdictions, i.e. inter-systemic and intra-systemic translation issues, including multilingual national or supranational contexts, both institutional and non-institutional (see e.g. Borja Albi and Prieto Ramos 2013); ▪ methods and approaches applied in recent or ongoing studies, including focus on empirical, theoretical, corpus-based / corpus-driven, sociological, historical or process research insights (see e.g. Biel 2017, Biel and Engberg 2013). Proposals must be explicit about the above variables, i.e. thematic focus, legal contextualisation and research methods. They will contribute to a structured debate on issues of common interest and, in turn, to an overview of the state-of-the-art and new avenues for innovation in LTS. Deadline for abstract submission: 15 January 2019 Information on how to submit an abstract:

The recent rapid growth of Translation Studies as a discipline resulted in major methodological d... more The recent rapid growth of Translation Studies as a discipline resulted in major methodological developments and emergence of strong sub-disciplines, including Legal Translation Studies. Legal Translation Studies has grown exponentially since 1970s and has now become an autonomous interdiscipline, strengthened by real life needs for legal translation and interpreting in the European Union. The growth has brought new methods and angles, including empirical and quantitative studies, such as corpus-based approaches, process research, workplace studies, critical discourse analysis, and sociological studies, resulting in increased methodological reflection and rigour

Especially, the features of our globalized multicultural societies pose unprecedented challenges to practitioners who, in their daily work, often perceive the shortcomings of inherited models and established norms, and who thus often also experience acute dilemmas. In this scenario, we have seen a rise of sociological approaches, post-structuralist and critical approaches applied to legal translation, ethnographic studies and perspectives based on knowledge communication theories. In the light of these approaches emphasizing the role of legal translators as (pro)active agents, legal translation emerges as complex decision-making activity not only with challenges concerning the knowledge to be conveyed, but also with deep socio-political and ethical implications. In the panel, we want to have a special focus upon such approaches, but without limiting us to this type of innovative studies in the field of legal translation. Importantly, the panel wants to counter the tendency of fragmentation following the growth in number of studies and the rise in level of autonomy by presenting different approaches together.

Like legal translation, legal interpreting, in particular court interpreting, has developed separately within the field of Interpreting Studies. Much of the focus has been on norms, ethics, working conditions and training, with a solid grounding in empirical data. What legal translation and legal interpreting have in common is the cross-systemic and cross-cultural mediation of legal discourse; nevertheless, they seem to be researched in two distinct parallel worlds. Interestingly, the internal boundary is more pronounced in research than in professional practice where court translators and interpreters have joint qualifications in a number of countries.

This panel aims at integrating and consolidating the existing and novel data from varied angles across internal boundaries to arrive at methodological, pedagogical and theoretical generalisations about legal translation and interpreting.

EU Legal Culture and Translation in the Era of Globalisation The Hybridisation of EU Terminology on the Example of Competition Law, 2019

The present chapter has a twofold aim: first, it reports on the panel EU Legal Culture and Transl... more The present chapter has a twofold aim: first, it reports on the panel EU Legal Culture and Translation at the ILLA (International Law and Language Association) relaunch conference, focusing on the main topics which emerged from the contributions – most notably, the hybridity of translator-mediated EU legal culture; second, it explores EU hybridity by focusing on the terminology of EU competition law which clearly demonstrates how concepts and ideas have travelled from outside the EU, colonising and/or merging with existing concepts, and
how they have travelled within the EU primarily through translation. The main argument set forward is that EU terminology is the result of the Europeanisation of law which is achieved through the convergence of national laws and law harmonisation, but is also strongly affected
by global trends which are in turn influenced by socio-political and historical factors. The final section discusses the ‘side effects’ of hybridity, including instability of meaning, graphic/surface
similarity and semantic opacity, asymmetries of terms between official languages and the complex relation between supranational and national levels of meaning.

The Journal of Specialised Translation

Although central in translation practice, and increasing in volume as well as impact due to the g... more Although central in translation practice, and increasing in volume as well as impact due to the growing globalisation and explosion of financial transactions and increasing business activity, economic translation –including business and financial translation – has been little researched and discussed over the years. Yet it constitutes a fascinating and robust area that grows hand-in-hand with the evolution of human civilisation and the development of societies or the developing world. In this global village, the concept of ‘economics’ in translation has become even more relevant lately, due to the ever-increasing technicalisation of the profession and the alteration of the translation habitus in Bourdieu’s terms, which unavoidably affects the translation profession, not least with respect to the diminishing rates and deteriorating working conditions. This special issue aims to explore the specificities and particularities of economic translation as it has been practised over the years and as it is being currently practised around the globe, and also investigate new research trends that appear in the field. At the same time, it wishes to cast some light on the economics of the profession and the changing habitus of the translator.

Manual on EU Translation into Ukrainian, 2024

Research Methods in Legal Translation and Interpreting: Crossing Methodological Boundaries, 2019