Secondary term formation within the EU: term transfer, legal transplant or approximation of Member States' legal systems? (original) (raw)

The EU legal system and the legal systems of its Member States have to adapt to the ever-changing nature of society and are therefore in a constantly evolving state. The EU, which is characterised by a unique lawmaking system, has proved to be an inexhaustible source of legislation, giving rise to a dynamic legal context. The same dynamicity can be observed also from a linguistic perspective. Due to the multilingualism principle, which makes multilingual communication a mandatory activity in EU institutions, new EU legislation and, consequently, new legal concepts are expressed in equally authentic texts. As a result, 23 different varieties of national official languages are being developed within the EU and existing terms are already undergoing a Europeanisation process. This paper presents a case study conducted on the terminology extracted from a corpus of parallel EU documents in English and Italian on the specific subdomain of the standing of victims in criminal proceedings and...

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Law and Language in the European Union

Global Jurist Topics, 2003

In this paper I would like to elaborate on the interaction between law and language. The use of the different (legal) languages of the European Union Member States is one of the most practical and most difficult problems in the process of European integration. In February 2003 the Commission launched an Action Plan on European Contract Law. On of the official aims will be the preparation of a common frame of reference, providing a pan-European terminology and rules. Still not solved is the question, if this common frame of reference will be accessible in all Member State languages or only in some selected languages. This article will reflect the need of a better and more coherent legal language use on a European Union level and describe the linguistic instruments offered by national States and the European Union itself. Heutger: Law and Language in the European Union 3 (en) http://europa.eu.int/comm/consumers/policy/developments/contract\_law/com\_2003\_68\_en.pdf. This Action Plan was result of the process of consultation and discussion about the way in which problems resulting from divergences between national contract laws in the EU should be dealt with at the European level. This initiative dates back to July 2001 when the commission launched a communication on European Contract law.

Terminological equivalence in European, British and Italian criminal law texts: a case study on victims of crime

Since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, cooperation in the fields of justice and home affairs has become a matter of high priority for all Member States of the European Union. This cooperation finds its concrete expression in a number of important legal instruments adopted by EU institutions, which are already, or are currently being, implemented in the Member States. EU legal instruments represent sources of law used to approximate the laws and regulations of the Member States. However, the EU's intervention in different legal subfields cannot prevent differences from being identified among the legal systems involved (EU's supranational and Member States' national legal systems). A terminological analysis of an English-Italian corpus of EU texts dealing with the legal subfield of the standing of victims in criminal proceedings and their rights allows the identification of differences in the Italian and British implementation strategies and in their way of conceptualising even relevant key elements such as "victim". This paper, which is part of an ongoing PhD research project, illustrates the main characteristics of bilingual legal terminology in a multi-judicial framework (conceptual asymmetries, different degrees of equivalence, synonymy and polysemy) and presents the current research work by showing a few examples of legal/cultural gaps, which necessarily need to be taken into account when translating or mediating between the two cultures/languages.

EU Legal Culture and Translation, a special issue of The International Journal of Language & Law

This article introduces the special issue of JLL on EU legal culture and translation. The introduction gives an overview of the papers comprised in the special issue and provides the theoretical background to set the scene for the discussion in the papers. The special issue is a follow-up on the panel organised at the Language and Law in a World of Media, Globalisation and Social Conflicts conference at the University of Freiburg. We argue that the EU legal culture is a perfect case in point for the study of the intersection between law and language. Due to the extreme degree of mediation and filtering of law through the EU's official languages, the EU legal culture emerges through translation as a hybrid supranational pan-European construct with mutual dependencies on national legal cultures. The contributions to the special issues address various aspects of the law and language intersection in the EU context: the role of English as the EU's lingua franca, the impact of national legal cultures on legal translation, strategic ambiguity and its interpretation by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the impact of EU integration on legal languages, and finally, framing and ideology in EU legal translation. Overall, by approaching the EU legal culture from various perspectives, this special issue refines our understanding of how the EU legal culture is affected by multilingual translation.

“N/A: No concise terminological solution has been found to designate the concept”. Exploring the third space of terminology transfer in EU legal translation

This paper aims to explore the notion of Third Space in EU legal translation by means of a terminology-driven analysis of translation compromise solutions traced in the interinstitutional EU terminology database IATE. From a methodological point of view, the analysis combines a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The first quantitative phase consists in querying IATE-in particular, its Comparative Multilingual Legal Vocabulary collection-in search of those traces of cultural compromise left in the translation transfer by lawyer-linguists working at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The second qualitative phase aims to map the translation techniques used by lawyer-linguists to cope with the absence of equivalent terms. The focus of this qualitative section is on conceptual voids ("N/A"/"Vide") and "Formulations" found in Spanish as main source and target language/legal system in combination with English, French and Italian as source/target languages/legal systems.

How do supranational terms transfer into national legal systems? A corpus-informed study of EU English terminology in consumer protection directives and UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts

Terminology, 2020

The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supra-national 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 cate-gorisation 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.

National law in supranational case-law: A linguistic analysis of European Court of Human Rights judgments in English

2019

The focus of the corpus-based and corpus-driven study presented in this book is on a supranational institution that has received relatively little attention in linguistic research: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). After briefly illustrating the functioning of the ECtHR and its historical development, the first part of the book delves into the Court’s language regime, which consists in the use of only two official languages, i.e. English and French. The linguistic study presented in the second part of the book concerns the presence of Italian national “system-bound elements” (SBEs) in ECtHR case-law. SBEs are elements originally embedded in a legal and judicial system that are recontextualised in a different legal environment. To extract Italian SBEs from a corpus of sixteen ECtHR judgments published in English, an innovative methodology was proposed combining event templates with keywords. This allowed the retrieval of 401 expressions referring to different Italian SBEs, which were analysed in terms of their frequency, distribution, and linguistic form. The study reveals that a variety of national and international sources co-exist in the corpus and that translation plays a fundamental role in the drafting of supranational case-law, which requires the creation of “stipulative corresponding expressions”.

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