USING PARALLEL CORPORA TO STUDY THE TRANSLATION OF LEGAL SYSTEM-BOUND TERMS: THE CASE OF NAMES OF ENGLISH AND SPANISH COURTS

M a r í a D e l M a r S á n c h ez ( U n i ve rs i t y o f A l ca l á , S p a i n )

F ra n c i s co V i g i e r M o re n o ( U n i ve rs i t y Pa b l o d e O l av i d e , S p a i n )

E l e n a A l ca l d e Pe ñ a l ve r ( U n i ve rs i t y o f A l ca l á , S p a i n )

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ContentsCorpora and Research in Legal Translation

Objectives of Our Study

Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus

Results Obtained from Corpus Analysis

Conclusion and Future Research

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Corpora and Research in Legal Translation Corpus-based approaches have revolutionized TS → empirical study of many translation-relatedelements

Limited use of corpora in legal translation, but steadily gaining ground (Monzó, 2008; Scott, 2012;Biel, 2014; Pontrandolfo, 2015; Sánchez Ramos & Vigier Moreno, 2015)

Parallel corpora → bilingual lexicography and terminography

System-specificity of law in LT → legal asymmetry and conceptual-terminological incongruity → legalsystem-bound terms → translation technique + skopos + comparative law exercise

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Objectives of Our Study Translation of legal system-bound terms (Spanish English) objectively, systematically and on thelight of authentic data (Biel, 2010: 2).

Scarcity of legal parallel corpora or unavailability of the few ones built in this language pair

Compilation of an ad-hoc, parallel corpus

CJEU Judgments in English and Spanish

Reliable bi-texts and presence of legal system-bound terms (court names) and their translations

Criminal court names:

o Magistrates’ Court, Crown Court, High Court (of Justice), Court of Appeal and Supreme Court (England and Wales)

o Juzgado de Paz, Juzgado de (Primera Instancia e) Instrucción, Juzgado de lo Penal, Audiencia Provincial, Tribunal Superior de Justicia, Audiencia Nacional and Tribunal Supremo (Spain)

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Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus

Parallel Corpora and Translation Studies (Baker, 1995; Blum-Kulka, 2004; Calzada

Pérez, 2017)

How to desing our corpus?

DOCUMENTATION → Design criteria

COMPILATION → Dowloading, organizing and aligning texts

ANALYSIS

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Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus DOCUMENTATION → Design criteria (Bowker & Pearson, 2002)

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DESIGN CRITERIA

Purpose Translation of legal system-bound terms in judgmentsissued by the CJEU

Size Not a huge corpus (Biel, 2010; Scott, 2012)

Medium Written texts

Topic and text type Legal (CJEU judgments)

Authorship CJEU

Publication date 1990-2014

Languages English and Spanish

http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/

Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus COMPILATION

Html and pdf files

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Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus COMPILATION

Html and pdf files

Files management

Two subcorpora (EN, ES)

Institution (Court) folders

EN

ES

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→

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Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus COMPILATION

Html and pdf files

Files management

Files format (.txt)

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Files Tokens Types

EN 127 844898 13121

ES 127 938276 20262

English Courts Parallel sub-corpus

Files Tokens Types

EN 145 767661 12259

ES 145 832945 18108

Spanish Courts Parallel sub-corpus

Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus COMPILATION

Html and pdf files

Files management

Files format (.txt)

Aligment: sentence level

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Design of Our BilingualParallel Corpus

COMPILATION Aligment: sentence level (1:1) Intertext: a free open-source program developed by

Vondřička (2014) .tmx

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Design of Our Bilingual Parallel Corpus Compilation

Html and pdf files

Files management

Files format (.txt)

Aligment: sentence level

English Courts Parallel sub-corpus: 127 aligned judgments, 16012 alingned sentence pairs

Spanish Courts Parallel sub-corpus: 145 aligned judgments, 13971 aligned sentence pairs

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Design of OurBilingual Parallel Corpus ANALYSIS .tmx imported into SDL Trados

Studio WinAlign

ResultsANALYSIS FRAMEWORK

Search of the selected terms and their translations in our translation memories

Identification of the translation technique used to convey the term in the target language

Borrowing, literal translation, description, amplification and adaptation

Analysis of other grammatical, syntactic and stylistic features

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MAGISTRATES’ COURT

Preceded by article la, the Spanish term for court [juzgado] being a masculine noun

Ambiguous reference to the place name where the court sits (e.g., “la Nottingham Magistrates’ Court” and “la Reading and Sonning Magistrates’ Court”).

Inconsistent use of the apostrophe (“la Richmond Magistrates’ Court” vs “la Richmond Magistrates Court”)

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CROWN COURT

Preceded by article la or las

Inconsistent reference to the place name where the court sits (e.g., “la Manchester Crown Court”, “Crown CourtLeeds”, “la Crown Court de Maidstone” and “la Crown Court, Bolton”), probably influenced by heterogeneity in source texts

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AUDIENCIA PROVINCIAL

Ambiguous amplifications (“Salamanca Regional High Court”), which may mislead the reader when back-translated

Place name treated as part of the noun of the court (“the Audiencia Provincial de Castellón”)

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AUDIENCIA NACIONAL

Inconsistency in amplification: 11 times followed by “National High Court” and 9 times followed by “Spain”

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Conclusions and Future Research Ad-hoc parallel corpora → useful tool for the study of the translation of legal system-bound terms (froma qualitative and quantitative approach)

Translation of court names in CJEU judgements ES-EN

Overwhelming prevalence of borrowings over other translation techniques (95% of occurrences) → surprisingresult given the binding nature of CJEU decisions for all EU Member States

Inconsistency in amplifications and in their syntactic and stylistic treatment

Contravention of two principles for the translation of court names: informative value and accuracy (Goscinki, 2005)

Further uses of our corpus → use of phraseology in CJEU judgments, diachronic study on translationeseand follow-up study on the translation of court names with a greater number of language pairs

Training purposes (Sánchez and Vigier, 2015)

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Elena Alcalde Peñalvere.alcalde@uah.es@Elena_Alcalde

María del Mar Sánchez Ramosmar.sanchezr@uah.es@delmartrad

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Using Parallel Corpora to Study the Translation of Legal System-bound Terms: the Case of Names of English and Spanish Courts

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