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Article published In: Terminology
Vol. 26:2 (2020) ► pp.184–212

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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

 | University of Warsaw
 | Kozminski University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 4 December 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00050.bie
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supranational 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 categorisation 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.
Article outline
  • 1.EU supranational terms as a special category of legal terms
  • 2.Transposition of directives into the Member States’ national legal systems and its impact on national terminology
  • 3.EU law: Consumer protection law as a case in point
  • 4.EU English and national legal Englishes
  • 5.Material and method
  • 6.Analysis of EU terms in transposition into national legal systems
    • 6.1Terms which resist travelling: Absences in transposing acts
    • 6.2Terms which travel easily: A degree of overlap and imports
    • 6.3Modifications and localisations of terms during transposition
    • 6.4Transfer of EU concepts during transposition
  • 7.Conclusions: Term and concept transfer techniques in transposition
  • Notes
  • References
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