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ABSTRACT
Phraseology is a key element to take into account when considering the quality of a translated text. This paper investigates the translation of multi-word terms in a bilingual (English-Italian) parallel corpus of European Union (EU) labour law legislation. The aim of the research is to identify the recurrent patterns of translational behaviour for these terms in view of the complexities of legal translation in the multilingual context of the EU. The study was carried out with a frequency-based approach, combining quantitative analysis with the aid of corpus linguistics tools and qualitative analysis of the parallel sections where the collocations occur. The data were compared with a reference corpus of Italian national labour law legislation and the results were considered in the light of the contextual factors that may have influenced the translators’ choices. The findings reveal inconsistencies in the translational behaviour for the multi-word terms analysed, strong interference from the source texts on the collocational patterns used and marked divergence from the conventions of legal language in the target culture. In the context of universals of translation, the study also provides evidence of the untypical collocations hypothesis as a linguistic feature that characterises legal translation.
Notes on contributor
Francesca L. Seracini holds an MA in Foreign Languages and Literatures and a Ph.D. in Linguistic Sciences. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan). Her main research areas are specialised translation (in particular, legal translation, phraseology, quality in translation), legal language (especially aspects related to European Union legal English vs. British legal English and the popularisation of EU legislation), corpus linguistics (corpus-based Translation Studies, corpus-based practice in translation teaching and learning) and professional communication.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Information retrieved from Translation and Multilingualism. Retrieved November 9, 2019. http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/translation-and-multilingualism-pbHC0414307/.
2 Retrieved May 18, 2019. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1451989021436&uri=CELEX:52015DC0215.
3 Retrieved May 18, 2019. http://ec.europa.eu/translation/maltese/guidelines/documents/dgt_translation_quality_guidelines_en.pdf.
5 The laws were downloaded from Normattiva, the official website of the Italian laws in force (www.normattiva.it, Retrieved January 8, 2019) and from Parlamento.it, the official website of the Italian Parliament (www.parlamento.it, Retrieved January 8, 2019), where legislation is classified by area of the law.
6 AntConc 3.2.3m concordacing package developed by Laurence Anthony (http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html) was used for the present study.
7 The words collocating a minimum of eight times with the selected terms were taken into consideration.
8 lit. the said workers.
9 lit. working mothers, within the first year of their child’s life.
10 Interestingly, the term interinale is the term used instead in Italian everyday language: the fact that lexical collocations that are more typical in everyday language are found in translated EU legislation was also observed by Biel (Citation2014, p. 291) in her study of the textual fit of translated EU legislation.