Spanish and English terminological study based on comparable Corpus of Employment contracts (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
This paper focuses on the study of word combinations "of common usage" which are "lexicalized", have "syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiom-atized and carry connotations, and have an emphatic or intensifying function. " (Gläser 1994/1995, 45). Following previous research on Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) and legal phraseology, we will define, identify and classify these units in English and Spanish according to their form and meaning, using a comparable corpus of sales contracts. To carry out our study, we will focus on a number of descriptors that are commonly used within these units on the basis of the headwords they collocate with, in order to determine how specific or general they are in their form, use and meaning since this issue poses translation problems. As genres determine matters such as or terminology and phraseology, the results will be useful for specialized translators and legal drafters.
Lexical chunks in English and Spanish sales contracts
Terminology, 2019
This paper focuses on the study of word combinations “of common usage” which are “lexicalized”, have “syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiomatized and carry connotations, and have an emphatic or intensifying function.” (Gläser 1994/1995, 45). Following previous research on Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) and legal phraseology, we will define, identify and classify these units in English and Spanish according to their form and meaning, using a comparable corpus of sales contracts. To carry out our study, we will focus on a number of descriptors that are commonly used within these units on the basis of the headwords they collocate with, in order to determine how specific or general they are in their form, use and meaning since this issue poses translation problems. As genres determine matters such as or terminology and phraseology, the results will be useful for specialized translators and legal drafters.
Challenges of Terminology Extraction from Legal Spanish Corpora
2018
Untangling the complexities of legal documentation is an imperative need for non practitioners of the legal profession. The terminology used in the domain is complex and it usually requires expert knowledge to be fully understood, since the legal framework is constantly being updated and the meaning of terms vary accordingly. Non-proprietary Automatic Terminology Extraction (ATE) tools are required in this particular domain in which documents contain private and sensitive data. This paper describes methods for obtaining accurate legal terms from labour law corpora, overcoming the difficulties present in the area, and also analyses the peculiarities of the legal jargon, specifically, in Spanish language. The performed experiments, executed with JATE, a wellknown open source library in the ATE literature, are still preliminary, but promising.
Translating Contracts and Agreements: a Corpus Linguistics Perspective 1
This paper will show how we carried out a study of binomial expressions in common law agreements in the light of Corpus Linguistics. We have attempted to provide translators with the necessary linguistic and cultural elements to enable them to render a natural translation, that is, to translate legal language into legal language. Binomial expressions are formed by two words belonging to the same grammatical category and joined by a and or or. Some examples are: terms and conditions, any and all, executed and delivered, due and payable, action or proceeding, agreement or obligation.
Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies, 2013
This paper describes the Corpus of Free Trade Agreements (henceforth FTA), a specialized parallel corpus in English and Spanish from Europe and America and a smaller subcorpus in English-Norwegian and Spanish-Norwegian that was prepared and then aligned with Translation Corpus Aligner 2 (Hofland & Johansson, 1998). The data was taken from Free Trade Agreements. These agreements are specialized texts officially signed and ratified by several countries and blocks of countries in the last twenty years. Thus, FTAs are a rich repository for terminology and phraseology that is used in different fields of business activity throughout the world. The corpus contains around 1.37 million words in the English section and 1.48 million words in its Spanish counterpart, plus 60,000 words each in the Spanish-Norwegian and English-Norwegian subcorpus. The corpus is being used primarily to study the terms and specialized collocations that include these terms in this kind of specialized texts.
Legal Terminology for Translators: Company Law. A Bilingual Corpus-Driven Project
POLISSEMA – Revista de Letras do ISCAP, 2020
In a world where people, goods, services, companies, and capital move globally, legal translation plays a crucial role because legal documents and rules regulate all these exchanges. Legal translation is acknowledged as a daunting and time-consuming task, due to the culturebound nature of legal terms and the complexity of legal language. Existing terminology resources do not provide translators with enough information to make informed decisions without extensive searches and concept comparison. The aim of this article is to present a corpus-driven bilingual (British English and European Portuguese) terminology project in the domain of company law (company incorporation) with a view to translating company types and incorporation documents, as well as to understanding and deciding on the most suitable strategies to find equivalents in legal translation. As far as methodology is concerned, we follow the typical workflow of bilingual or multilingual terminology projects, according to the literature on the subject as well as terminology standards. We resort to comparable corpora, semi-automatic term extraction tools and concordance tools, as well as terminology management software.
A Parameter-based method for translating Polish Contract Law Terms into Spanish
The paper deals with problems of legal translation from Polish into Spanish. It analyses selected terms related to contracts which are regulated in the Polish Civil Code and their possible translations into Spanish. In order to find adequate translation equivalents the author applies the method of parametrisation of legal terms (along with the method of comparing parallel texts and the skopos theory). The parametrisation of legal terms helps to systematically characterise and compare them and thus to identify differences in the meanings of the source language and target language terms and to choose the best equivalents. It may also facilitate the selection of a technique of providing translation equivalents for non-equivalent or partially equivalent terms. Parametrisation is understood as determining for each analysed term a set of properties it shows with respect to translationally relevant parameters – one property out of each parameter. A parameter is conceived of as a set of homogeneous properties.
Sustainable Multilingualism
The article is intended to present possibilities of using contrastive terminology analysis in teaching a foreign language, particularly concentrating on legal terminology and contract law. This paper has several aims. Firstly, it intends to overview foreign language teaching possibilities paying special attention to the method of contrastive semantic analysis and possible ways to involve corpus linguistics into the teaching/learning process. Secondly, it seeks to define specifics of legal terminology and contextual differences in Lithuanian, English and German contract law. Thirdly, the focus is also on semantic equivalence between lexical items of different languages. Fourthly, it presents a possible semantic analysis of very basic but at the same time quite complicated contract law terms in the EU languages. Three European languages (Lithuanian, English and German) that are widely used in commerce, logistics, administration and diplomacy are chosen for the analysis. The combination of the contrastive method and analysis of legal context of the chosen languages may reveal the different aspects of the terms. Theoretical frameworks and practical analysis presented in the article could be of great interest for LSP learners, terminologists, translators, teachers and dictionary compilers.
: Phraseological units in English-Spanish legal dictionaries: a comparative study
Abstract A bilingual general language or specialized dictionary that addresses translation needs should include phraseological information. However, there is still no consensus as to the type of combinatorial information that should be included, where it should be placed, or how it should be classified. Not surprisingly, there are almost as many approaches to phraseology and phraseological units as authors or types of study. In this paper, some of the most representative legal English-Spanish dictionaries are described in order to evaluate their potential usefulness for translators who need to produce a target language text. The comparison of these dictionaries is based on the headword vista [‘trial’, ‘hearing’]. Our results concluded that a legal dictionary for translators should provide various ways of accessing phraseological units as well as a classification of phraseological information within each entry for a more effective retrieval of information. Finally, the dictionary should include a short description of the unit so that users are better able to understand its meaning and usage in different contexts as well as its potential contextualized correspondences in the target language and culture.