Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

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

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology (EUROPHRAS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10596))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Corpus-based Translation Studies has opened new avenues to research since Mona Baker published her seminal study back in the 1990s. In comparison to other domains within Translation Studies, in legal translation corpus-based research has not been so widely used despite its incontestable potential and usefulness. In this field, parallel corpora are chiefly used to study the translation process and to identify translation options for problematic terminological and phraseological units. Hence, parallel corpora allow researchers to systematically and objectively study the solutions given to pre-identified translation problems, like legal system-bound terms, which are the quintessential feature of legal translation as clear exponents of legal asymmetry and conceptual-terminological incongruity.

In this contribution, we describe the design, compilation and alignment of a specialised bilingual parallel corpus (English-Spanish) comprising judgments delivered by the European Union Court of Justice. With the main aim of studying the options found for the translation of court names, one corpus is made up of 127 aligned judgments in English and Spanish that refer to English courts, whereas the other corpus consists of 145 aligned files that refer to Spanish courts. The corpus was aligned at sentence level, accounting for 16,012 aligned sentence pairs for the English corpus, and 13,971 for the Spanish corpus. In the following we present the most relevant outcomes of this study (both from a qualitative and quantitative perspective), describe technical aspects related to the compilation process and point to further uses of these corpora, specifically for training purposes.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 74.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 95.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    For a detailed account of translation and multilingualism at the ECJ see [18] and [25] respectively.

  2. 2.

    For more on the English court system see https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/courts-structure-0715.pdf (last accessed: 22 May 2017).

  3. 3.

    For more on the Spanish court system see http://www.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/Portal/es/administracion-justicia/organizacion-justicia/organizacion-juzgados/juzgados-tribunales (last accessed: 22 May 2017).

  4. 4.

    Regional High Court may be especially risky, as, if back-translated into Spanish, could lead to Tribunal Superior de Justicia [High Court of Justice], which is a region-level court and not a province-level court like Audiencia Provincial.

References

  1. Laviosa, S.: Corpora and translation studies. In: Granger, S., Lerot, J., Petch-Tyson (eds.) Corpus-Based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies, pp. 45–54. Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Soriano Barabino, G.: La creación de corpus de documentos reales por parte del traductor jurídico, del investigador y del docente de traducción jurídica: aspectos jurídicos y prácticos de las dificultades de recopilación. In: II AIETI. Actas del II Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación, pp. 196–206. AIETI, Madrid (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Biel, L., Engberg, J.: Research models and methods in legal translation. Linguist. Antverp. 12, 1–11 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Biel, Ł.: The textual fit of translated EU law: a corpus-based study of deontic modality. Transl. 20(3), 332–355 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Pontrandolfo, G.: Investigating judicial phraseology with COSPE. A contrastive corpus-based study. In: Fantinuoli, C., Zanettin, F. (eds.) New Directions in Corpus-Based Translation Studies, pp. 137–160. Language Science Press, Berlin (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Andrades Moreno, A.: Propuesta de equivalencias de binomios en la traducción jurídica inglés-español. Estudios de Traducción 6, 129–145 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Monzó Nebot, E.: Corpus-based activities in legal translator training. Interpret. Transl. Train. 2(2), 221–252 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Laursen, A., Arinas Pellón, I.: Text corpora in translator training. A case study of the use of comparable corpora in classroom teaching. Interpret. Transl. Train. 6(1), 45–70 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Sánchez Ramos, M., Vigier Moreno, F.: Using monolingual virtual corpora in public service legal translation. In: Martín-Monge, E., Elorza, I., García-Riaza, B. (eds.) Technology-Enhanced Language Learning for Specialized Domains, pp. 228–239. Routledge, London, New York (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Vigier Moreno, F.: Teaching the use of ad hoc corpora in the translation of legal texts into the second language. Lang. Law/Linguagem e Direito 3(1), 100–119 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Scott, J.: Can genre-specific DIY corpora, compiled by legal translators themselves assist them in ‘Learning the Lingo’ of legal subgenres? Comp. Legilinguistics 12, 87–100 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Scott, J.: Towards professional uptake of DIY electronic corpora in legal genres. In: Salford Working Papers in Translation and Interpreting, pp. 1–22 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Biel, Ł.: Corpus-based studies of legal language for translation purposes: methodological and practical potential. In: Heine, C., Engberg, J. (eds.) Reconceptualizing LSP. Online Proceedings of the XVII European LSP Symposium 2009, Aarhus, pp. 1–19 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Way, C.: The challenges and opportunities of legal translation and translator training in the 21st century. Int. J. Commun. 10, 1009–1020 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Harvey, M.A.: Beginner’s course in legal translation: the case of culture-bound terms. In: ASTTI/ETI, pp. 357–369 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  16. De Groot, R., Van Laer, C.: The dubious quality of legal dictionaries. Int. J. Leg. Inf. 34(1), 65–86 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Prieto Ramos, F., Orozco Jutorán, M.: De la ficha terminológica a la ficha traductológica: hacia una lexicografía al servicio de la traducción jurídica. Babel 61(1), 110–130 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Künnecke, M.: Translation in the EU: language and law in the EU’s Judicial Labyrinth. Maastricht J. Eur. Comp. Law 20(2), 243–260 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Baker, M.: Corpora in translation studies: an overview and some suggestions for future research. Target 7(2), 223–243 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Blum-Kulka, S.: Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation. In: Venuti, L. (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 209–313. Routledge, New York (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Calzada Pérez, M.: Five turns of the screw: a CAD analysis of the European parliament. J. Lang. Polit. 16(3), 412–433 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Kenny, D.: Lexis and Creativity in Translation. Manchester, St. Jerome (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Mauranen, A., Kujamäki, P.: Translation Universals. Do they exist? John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Seghiri, M.: Metodología de elaboración de un glosario bilingüe y bidireccional (inglés-español/español-inglés) basado en corpus para la traducción de manuales de instrucciones de televisores. Babel 63(1), 43–64 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Łachacz, O., Mańko, R.: Multilingualism at the court of justice of the European union: theoretical and practical aspects. Stud. Log. Gramm. Rhetor. 34(47), 75–92 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Bowker, L., Pearson, J.: Working with Specialized Language. Routledge, London, New York (2002)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  27. Koehn, P.: Europarl: a parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. In: Conference Proceedings: The Tenth Machine Translation Summit, Phuket, Thailand, pp. 79–86 (2005). http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/pkoehn/publications/europarl-mtsummit05.pdf. Accessed 05 Oct 2017

  28. Tiedemann, K.: Bitext Alignment. Morgan & Claypool, Toronto (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Vondřička, P.: Aligning parallel texts with Intertext. In: Calzolari, N. et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014, pp. 1875–1879. European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Šarcevic, S.: New Approach to Legal Translation. Kluwer Law International, The Hague (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Holl, I.: Técnicas para la Traducción Jurídica: Revisión de diferentes propuestas, últimas tendencias. Hermeneus: Revista de Traducción e Interpretación 14, 1–17 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Orozco Jutorán, M.: Propuesta de un catálogo de técnicas de traducción: la toma de decisiones informada ante la elección de equivalentes. Hermeneus: Revista de Traducción e Interpretación 16, 233–264 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Goscinski, M.: The names of English judicial offices, courts and tribunals and their translation into Polish. Comp. Legilinguistics 28, 43–62 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Ctra. de Utrera km. 1, 41013, Seville, Spain

    Francisco J. Vigier

  2. University of Alcalá, Plaza de San Diego, s/n, 28801, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    María del Mar Sánchez

Authors
  1. Francisco J. Vigier
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. María del Mar Sánchez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Francisco J. Vigier or María del Mar Sánchez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

    Ruslan Mitkov

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Cite this paper

Vigier, F.J., del Mar Sánchez, M. (2017). Using Parallel Corpora to Study the Translation of Legal System-Bound Terms: The Case of Names of English and Spanish Courts. In: Mitkov, R. (eds) Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology. EUROPHRAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10596. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_19

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_19

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69804-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69805-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation