Legal Terminology

This paper examines the meaning and use of the terms prosfygas (refugee), metanastis (immigrant) and lathrometanastis (illegal immigrant), starting from the Electronic Text Corpus (ETC) of Parliamentary Questions. During its analysis we relied on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools such as Sketch Engine, Voyant Tools, as well as a range of specialised text mining tools in order to retrieve the dictionary profile for prósfygas, metanást􏰷s and lathrometanást􏰷s. Our ultimate goal is to understand the grammatical relations and the specific word collocations for each of these entries, as well as to provide indications for their semantic prosody, i.e. their tendency to appear systematically with either positive or negative significance. At the same time, we examine emotional polarity by using a model of automatic textual emotion analysis. The findings of the research confirm that the ideological polarisation is reflected in the semantic load of the terms under consideration.

What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin’s goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation.But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged.

This paper investigates some features of the technical legal terms in Leges Langobardorum. Rothair’s Edict was the first written codification of the Lombard customary law. The passage into writing, the writers’ choice of Latin and the use of Roman law texts as sources and models play an important role in determining the features of their legal vocabulary. Within this perspective, the specialized lexemes of Lombard Laws, the use of terms in ordinary and technical meanings and the polysemy and monoreferentiality of legal terminology are discussed.

This paper provides a brief overwiev of the juridical lexicon of the Cartula. The exposition follows the different sections of the formulaic structure of the documents. Attention is given to the continuities and discontinuities of lexical types and meanings with respect to the uses of the late and early medieval legal Latin.

Η μετανάστευση σε όλες τις εκφάνσεις της αποτελεί μια από τις μεγαλύτερες προκλήσεις της σύγχρονης εποχής. Απασχολεί πάρα πολλές χώρες του κόσμου και γι' αυτό και καθημερινά η ανάγκη για την θεσμοθέτηση και εφαρμογή ενός ρυθμιστικού κανονιστικού πλαισίου γίνεται όλο και πιο επιτακτική. Το θεματικό πεδίο της μετανάστευσης επιλέχθηκε λόγω του επίκαιρου χαρακτήρα του, αλλά και λόγω της έλλειψης πάγιας μεταναστευτικής πολιτικής από την πλευρά τη Ελλάδας. Συγκεκριμένα, στο πλαίσιο της εργασίας, καταρτίστηκε ένα λημματολόγιο με τους όρους και τις αποδόσεις τους στα ελληνικά, τους ορισμούς τους, τις πηγές τεκμηρίωσης τους, παραδείγματα χρήσης τους, αναφορά στο θεματικό τους πεδίο και τον γραμματικό τους τύπο και αποσπάσματα από σώματα κειμένων όπου απαντώνται οι όροι. Οι όροι δεν αφορούν μόνο τις μεταναστευτικές πολιτικές της ΕΕ, στην οποία ανήκει η Ελλάδα, αλλά και των ΗΠΑ. Μέσα από τα σώματα κειμένων που χρησιμοποιήθηκαν ως πηγή για την ανάκτηση του ορολογικού υλικού, παρατηρήθηκε μεγάλη διαφορά στις συνθήκες, στη νομοθεσία, στα όργανα αλλά και στην αντιμετώπιση του φαινομένου της λαθρομετανάστευσης.

Migration in all its manifestations is one of the greatest challenges of modern society. It is something that concerns many countries and therefore there is a need for enactment and implementation of a regulatory framework which is becoming more and more urgent every day. That is the reason why migration was chosen, in addition to the lack of migration policy in Greece. More specifically, a glossary was designed and created, including terms on migration with their translation, definitions, sources and examples, as well as information on their thematic field, grammar type and corpora where these terms have been found. The terms refer not only to EU migration policies-which are also implemented by Greece-but also to USA ones. Finally, through the corpora used as a source of the terms, great differences were found in the Treaties, the legislation as well as in the way of facing the illegal migration phenomenon.

Abstract: The paper presents the options available when selecting equivalents of the Chinese term 机关  jīguān in legal context. The author undertook the conceptual analysis of the potential German and Polish equivalents of 机关 applied in the General Principles of the Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China of April 12, 1986  (中华人民共和国民法通则 Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó mínfă tōngzé) and Civil Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China of April 9, 1991  (中华人民共和国民事诉讼法 Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó mínshì sùsòng fă). The corpus under study included the translation of the mentioned statutes into English proposed by Centre of Laws and Regulations in Law Press China (法规中心，法律出版社 Făguī zhōngxīn, Fălǜ chūbănshè). English and German are often intermediary languages in the process of finding equivalents in Polish-Chinese translation. The term 机关 used in a legal and/or administrative context is translated into English, German and Polish differently depending on the context.
Key words: Chinese statutory language, legal terminology, legal translation

关于将民事法律文本的《机关》术语翻译成英文、德文、波兰文的译文

提要： 本文主要介绍在法律场合的《机关》术语。作者做出在《中华人民共和国民法通则》（1986年4月12日第六届全国人民代表大会第四次会议通过）与《中华人民共和国民事诉讼法》（1991年4月9日第七届全国人民代表大会第四次会议通过）中都使用的《机关》术语分析，分析其德文及波兰文翻译对应词。语料库包括由法律出版社法规中心编辑的中国法律英文标准文本。波兰文—中文翻译仍需依赖英语及（或）德语作为中介语。《机关》术语用在法律及（或）行政场合有不同的含义，所以我们应该把《机关》术语依据场合翻译成英文、德文及波兰文。
关键词： 立法术语；法律术语；法律翻译

TERMIN 机关  jīguān W TEKSTACH PRAWA CYWILNEGO I JEGO TŁUMACZENIE NA ANGIELSKI, NIEMIECKI, POLSKI

Abstrakt: W artykule zaprezentowano ekwiwalenty terminu 机关 jīguān użytego w tekstach Ustawy o ogólnych regułach prawa cywilnego Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej z 12 kwietnia 1986 roku (中华人民共和国民法通则 Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó mínfă tōngzé) oraz w Ustawie o prawie postępowania cywilnego Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej z 9 kwietnia 1991 roku  (中华人民共和国民事诉讼法 Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó mínshì sùsòng fă). Autorka dokonała analizy potencjalnych ekwiwalentów terminu 机关 w języku niemieckim i polskim. Dobierając ekwiwalenty odniosła się nie tylko do terminów z tekstu źródłowego, ale także do ich ekwiwalentów w anglojęzycznej wersji wspomnianych ustaw, przygotowanej przez Centrum regulacji prawnych w Wydawnictwie prawniczym (法规中心，法律出版社 Făguī zhōngxīn, Fălǜ chūbănshè). Język angielski i język niemiecki stanowi często język pośredni w procesie tłumaczenia polsko-chińskiego. Wykazano, że odpowiedni dobór ekwiwalentów polisemu 机关 jest możliwy tylko przy znajomości kontekstu jego użycia.
Słowa kluczowe: chiński język prawny, terminologia prawna, tłumaczenie prawnicze

In this paper the terminology concerning the usufruct and easement in Poland and China was compared. The research material was the second book of the Polish Civil Code (promulgated on 23th April 1965) and the Chinese Property Rights Law (promulgated on 16th March 2007). To conduct the study the method of comparison of comparable texts was applied. In many cases it is possible to use functional equivalents from legal acts for examined terms. However, some terms have different ranges of meaning or the terms are non-equivalent and then applying, for instance, descriptive equivalents, is necessary.

W artykule porównana została terminologia dotycząca użytkowania oraz służebności w Polsce i w Chinach. Materiał badawczy stanowiła księga druga ustawy z dn. 23 kwietnia 1964 r. – Kodeks cywilny (Dz. U. z 1964 r. Nr 16, poz. 93) oraz 中华人民共和国物权法, Zhōnghuá rénmín gònghéguó wùquánfǎ – Ustawa o prawach rzeczowych Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej, ogłoszona dekretem Prezydenta ChRL nr 62 z dn. 16 marca 2007 r. Do przeprowadzenia badania zastosowana została metoda analizy tekstów porównywalnych. Dla badanych terminów w wielu przypadkach użyć można ekwiwalentów funkcjonalnych, które odnaleźć można w ustawach. Niektóre terminy mają jednak różny zakres znaczeniowy, bądź są to terminy bezekwiwalentowe i konieczne jest zastosowanie m.in. ekwiwalentów opisowych.

This paper aims to analyze the etymological origin of Macedonian and French legal terms. The focus is on the Macedonian legal terminology, having in mind that etymology researches referring to Macedonian terminology are not numerous unlike those referring to French terminology and French vocabulary in general. Object of analysis will be terms of Latin origin that play a very important role in this field, but also terms of other origin such as Greek, Italian. The analysis should show the influence of different historical, sociological and cultural factors in the process of borrowing and developing a specific legal terminology in both languages.
Keywords: etymology, legal terminology, borrowing, Macedonian, French

This article presents a proposal for a unidirectional bilingual glossary (Spanish-Bulgarian) of the most frequently used notary terms and collocations in testate succession field. The author will begin with a brief contextualization on the similarities and differences between the Notary institution and the concept of testate succession, based on the legislations of the States concerned. Next, the particularities of notarial language as one of the sublanguages of the Spanish and Bulgarian legal languages will be described. The glossary building process will be explained later, emphasis is placed on the main difficulties encountered and the solutions provided in this paper. Finally, a global reflection applicable to development of other support materials in legal terminology will be offered.

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.

1765 and 1767 saw the publication of the German, respectively the English translations of Lomonosov’s Kratkij rossijskij letopisec s rodosloviem (1760). For the very first time the European reading public could find out how Russians saw their own history. These translations testified to Russia’s ascent both as an empire and as a part of European learned society, and were made by youths who wanted to further their own career and were neither professional translators nor historians. In this article, we argue that the translations of Lomonosov’s Kratkij rossijskij letopisec s rodosloviem should not be studied as an isolated act of cultural transfer, but as an episode in a longer history of circulation of knowledge. We demonstrate the complexity of this circulation by reassessing the ‘quality’ of these translations and positioning them in that longer history of circulation of knowledge by analyzing the distribution of historical concepts (Begriffe) in Lomonosov’s original and its transl...

EU law has become ground zero for the application of terminology. Marked by legal multilingualism and operationalised by translation, EU law depends on terminology in multiple ways. Within this chapter we have tried to argue that by endorsing cognitive terminology approaches and applying their principles and methods to the domain of multilingual EU law, more benefits can be reaped in terms of disentangling the intricacies of multilingual communicative processes in EU law. Emphasis has been placed on EU terminology observed through the lens of multilingualism and the rising influence of English as EU lingua franca, and institutional translation which defines the specific context in which EU terms, often described as hybrid and neutral, are used. In the post-Brexit Union it is likely that EU legal English will cause greater semantic vagueness and instability, which will impact EU terminology.

The quality of the interpreting services provided in criminal courts has come to the fore in Spain as a result of the transposition into domestic law of the EU Directives on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings and on the right to information in criminal proceedings. Since one of the greatest challenges faced by court interpreters is precisely the lack of appropriate terminological resources, in this article we describe how we used empirical research results (to wit, the exploitation of a corpus of authentic, interpreter-mediated criminal
proceedings) to create resources that can help court interpreters to perform their task with accuracy, rigour and diligence. More specifically, we focus on translation-oriented terminological records, as adopted in the TIPp project (on the quality of court interpreting) on the basis of the approach developed in previous research on the translation of technology law (Law10N). We describe in detail the process of creating the Spanish-English record for the illustrative term letrado de la administración de justicia. By describing this process (including term selection, information mining, equivalence search and acceptability
analysis), we highlight the usefulness of this type of terminological record and its potential for other thematic subfields and language pairs.

В статье освещается вопрос о современном состоянии терминоведения и его отношений с другими актуальными направлениями в современном языкознании. Указывается, что терминоведение занимает важное место в языковой политике и в языковом планировании. В отличие от общеупотребительной лексики специальная профессиональная лексика создается намеренно, осознанно.  Доказывается, что через регулирование языковых процессов в отраслевых терминологиях, можно сознательно влиять на развитие языка и его функциональных возможностей.

17th and 18th Century Posters and Patents as Sources of Criminal Law Terms
Summary
In addition to religious texts, the first known legal texts in the Latvian language are found in the 17th century.
The first source of Latvian legal language was the “Linen Weaver Statues” (Linaudēju statūti) (1625), which were probably translated by the appointed secretary of the linen-weavers, Mārtiņš Baķītis, as indicates Jānis Straubergs.
At the end of the 17th century and at the beginning of the 18th century, almost 20 various patents or law excerpts were published in the Latvian language. ‘Patentes’ (lat. patentes litterae, open reports) was a name for posters or circulars that was widely used in Latvia in former times, and they announced government orders and laws. Only five translations of legal acts in the Latvian language can be associated with Criminal Law terminology: “The Punishment Law for Children's Killings” (Sodu likums pret to bērnu mušināšanu) (1684), “The Special Laws of the Military Court” (Savādi kara tiesas likumi) (1696), “Death Penalty Law Against the Sins of Immorality Between In-Laws” (Nāves soda likums pret nešķīstības grēkiem kas svaiņu starpā notiek), “The Patent Against Thefts and Robberies in Riga and Its Vicinity” (Patents pret zādzībām un laupīšanām Rīgā un apkārtnē) (1707) and “Prohibition for the Inhabitants of the Seaside to Rob Ships Stranded on the Shore” (“Aizliegums jūrmalas iedzīvotājiem aplaupīt piekrastē strandējošos kuģus” (1708). The study reviews the translations of laws which were performed by translators of German descent. According to Eiženija Peile, this can be linked with the fact that it was considered that German pastors had the best knowledge of the language. Therefore, until the beginning of the 1890s, clergy were the people that were asked to do translations.

Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA was the first legal act adopted by the European Union to lay down general provisions addressing victims of crime and their rights. Significant progress was achieved a decade later by adopting Directive 2012/29/EU, which established minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime. This article presents a study conducted on the terms starting with the head element “right” extracted from both acts. The aim was to determine whether the legal progress experienced in a decade was accompanied by an evolution in the terminology used. The study revealed that, when legal terminology is analysed from a diachronic perspective, different phenomena can be observed: in this case, instances of stability, formal neology, and complete neology were identified. Diachronic evolution phenomena in legal terminology are then considered from a didactic perspective: students of law, legal translation, and legal terminology are deemed likely to benefit significantly from the inclusion of the diachronic dimension in their studies.

In the last decade, EU legislators have been devoting increasing attention to victims of crime and their rights. The purpose of this study is to focus on English victim-related terminology and identify cases of terminological dynamism which can cause potential difficulties to legal translators. Although the EU and the national legal systems co-exist in and regulate the same judicial space, the terminology used is not shared by all the systems. The absence of a priori established equivalent terminologies may make it difficult for translators to map legal concepts to the appropriate legal system. The study therefore aims at highlighting the need for resources specifically designed for legal translators and presents MuLex, a legal translation-oriented TKB in which multilingual data are accompanied by conceptual maps underlying intra-linguistic asymmetries and different degrees of cross-linguistic equivalence.

The paper examines the possible usage of event templates derived from Frame-Based Terminology (Faber et al. 2005, 2006, 2007) as an aid to the extraction and management of legal terminology embedded in the multi-level legal system of the European Union. The method proposed here, which combines semi-automatic term extraction and a simplified event template containing six categories, is applied to an English corpus of EU texts focusing on victims of crime and their rights. Such a combination allows for the extraction of category-relevant terminological units and additional information, which can then be used for populating a terminological knowledge base organised on the basis of the same event template, but which also employs additional classification criteria to account for the multidimensionality encountered in the corpus.

Online law dictionaries based on traditional linguistic and text linguistic approaches do not fully satisfy the needs for help lawyers, students and professional translators have in specific types of situation. This state of affairs can be remedied by re−assessing the practical and theoretical foundations of online dictionaries in light of the technical options available for online information tools combined with modern lexicographic principles. The discussion indicates that the legal database is a repository of structured data serving online dictionaries that search for data in databases, retrieve the relevant data, and present them to users in predetermined ways. Lawyers, students and translators can thus access the data through targeted searches relating directly to the problems they need to solve, because search engines are designed according to dictionary functions, i.e. the type of help dictionaries can provide in certain types of situation. The dictionaries have both communic...

This chapter explores the incommensurability of criminal law concepts between common law and civil law jurisdictions and its implications for translation in the context of criminal justice. Since translation of legal concepts must take into account their intertextuality as well as statutory and/or judicial interpretation, an interdisciplinary framework for conducting legal micro-comparisons is proposed for translation purposes. The practical application of the framework is illustrated by analysing a criminal offence in terms of construction of criminal liability in a source legal system and mapping the offence onto a target legal system, consequently revealing that the corresponding criminal law concepts only partially overlap between the two jurisdictions. Against that backdrop, some translations of the source term denoting the criminal offence are critically assessed from the viewpoint of their legal accuracy in the target language, and an alternative functional equivalent is suggested in an attempt to remedy terminological incongruence. The study thus demonstrates that the accuracy of legal translation is conditional on the translator having a certain degree of bijural competence. The author concludes by highlighting lacunae in current translator and interpreter training in the United Kingdom and recommending the introduction of practical linguistic and comparative law modules in training curricula, designed to address the issue of incommensurability in legal translation.

Transius Conference 2015, The Centre for Legal and Institutional Translation Studies, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland, 24-26 June 2015

In the era of increasingly multicultural societies, legal translations are now commonly used to assist decision-making in the administration of criminal justice. While it is accepted that the legal competence expected of translators is unlike that of the legal profession (Engberg 2013), there is an immense responsibility on the former to convey the meaning of legal concepts in translation in a manner which reflects their understanding by the latter within the source legal system and, at the same time, is comprehensible to legal practitioners in the target system. Since substantive laws and canons of legal interpretation vary greatly between jurisdictions, it is proposed that—due to the gravity of its potential effects on decision-making—translation of documents for use in criminal proceedings, such as criminal records or court orders, does not only require consulting primary law sources but also recourse to legal method.

Against this backdrop, the author demonstrates how comparative law methodology (de Cruz 1999) can be adapted and applied to the legal translation process in order to unpack legal concepts and bridge their interjural incommensurability. By way of illustration, beginning with a step-by-step dissection of seemingly corresponding criminal offences in two systems stemming from the common law and the civil law traditions, differences between the constructions of criminal liability in the two jurisdictions are explored through the prism of statutory, or judicial, as the case may be, interpretation. The findings of this comparative exercise are then fed into semantic analysis  (Šarčević 1997), the results of which directly inform the legal translator’s choice of functional equivalents (Šarčević 1989). The presented workflow is intended as a useful tool of which a translator with no legal background may avail in the pursuit of terminological equivalence.