Article published In: Terminology
Vol. 29:1 (2023) ► pp.45–77
Terminological hybridity in institutional legal translation
A corpus-driven analysis of key genres of EU and international law
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 7 July 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.21047.pri
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.21047.pri
Abstract
The analysis of domain-specific terminology is essential for characterizing specialized discourses, and emerges as
a useful means of measuring the thematic hybridity of law and legal translation in particular. This paper accordingly presents a
large-scale mapping of terminological and phraseological features in a multi-genre corpus that was built as part of the LETRINT
project on institutional legal translation. The corpus-driven analysis focuses on the density of legal terminology and
phraseology, on the one hand, and that of terminology of other specialized domains, on the other, in nine genres that are
considered representative of three central legal functions (law-making, compliance monitoring and adjudication) in three
international settings (the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization). The comparative examination of
density scores provides empirical evidence of the common core features of the selected genres, and reveals variations based on
institutional thematic focus, primary legal function and genre specificities. These insights nuance our understanding of
international legal discourses and domain specialization in institutional translation.
Article outline
- 1.Background
- 2.Methodology
- 3.Annotation results
- 3.1Overall distribution of terminological features
- 3.2Distribution per institutional setting
- 3.2.1Distribution in the EU sub-corpora
- 3.2.2Distribution in the UN sub-corpora
- 3.2.3Distribution in the WTO sub-corpora
- 3.3Comparative analysis per primary legal function and genre
- 4.Conclusions
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
References
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