Considering foreignization and domestication in EU legal translation: a corpus-based study

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates foreignizing and domesticating strategies in the translation of EU legislative texts. It starts by briefly introducing the dichotomy between foreignizing and domesticating translations, which has recently been revisited in the field of legal translation. Intrigued by assertions that the translation of a normative text should be primarily foreignizing in order to express the intention of the legislator and criticisms of current EU translation practices for lack of effectiveness due to an approach combining both translation strategies by means of a parallel corpus of EU legislative texts we examine to what extent the two opposing translation strategies are used in the translation of EU law, putting the emphasis on the terminological level. Bearing in mind that the latter field is still relatively unknown this corpus-based study aims to provide more insight into the research of EU translation. While the results of the conducted corpus analysis evidence a mixture of both of these translation strategies, foreignization elements are especially visible in the overuse of nominalizations and in the translation of abbreviations.

KEYWORDS:

• Parallel corpora
• foreignization
• domestication
• EU translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Receiver-oriented approach is here understood as a functional approach to translation perhaps in a too narrow sense. Legal translation scholars advocating a functional approach to translation (e.g. Garzone, 2000; Šarčević, 1997) do consider other factors besides the (communicative) function, such as classification under the respective legal system, scope of application, and legal effect.

2 The British National Corpus. Accessed 23 June 2019. https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/british-national-corpus/.

3 Hrwac is a Croatian web corpus created in 2014 and consisting of texts collected from the web. The corpus size in 2014 was 1.2 billion words, whereas at the moment it amounts to 1.9 billion. Hrwac is the only reference corpus in Croatian available for users of Sketch Engine.

4 EFTA Surveillance Authority Decision No 15/04/COL of 18 February 2004 amending for the forty-first time the Procedural and Substantive Rules in the Field of State Aid by introducing a new chapter 9C: Professional secrecy in State aid decisions.

5 Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC, OJ L 119, 4.5.2016, pp. 1–88.

6 Croatian Insolvency Act (Official Gazette, Nos. 71/115, 104/17).

7 Official Gazette Nos. 94/13, 73/17, 14/19.

8 Under Art. 44 (1) of the Croatian Legal Drafting Guidelines (Official Gazette No. 74/2015), abbreviations shall not be used in legislative texts. Exceptionally, abbreviations of well-known meaning (such as etc.) may be used (Art. 44 (2)).

9 While in the past French and English were used to the same extent as drafting languages, a publication of the Directorate-General for Translation shows that 72.5 percent of legislative texts in 2008 were drafted in English (Bajčić, 2018, p. 13). For more on the languages used in the drafting process see Doczekalska (2018, pp. 168–172).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martina Bajčić

Martina Bajčić teaches Legal English, Legal German and EU Terminology at the Law Faculty of the University of Rijeka. She holds a PhD in Linguistics, Master’s degree in European integration law and a Diploma in Language and Law from the Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses mainly on legal translation, legal terminology and multilingual EU law.

Katja Dobrić Basaneže

Katja Dobrić Basaneže teaches Legal English and Legal German at the Law Faculty of the University of Rijeka. She holds a Phd in Translation Studies from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She has published papers on legal phraseology and legal translation. Her research interests lie in legal phraseology, legal translation and corpus linguistics.