engleski

Towards the Modern Croatian Legal Language: Revisions of the Croatian translation of the Austrian Civil Code by Franjo Josip Spevec

The Croatian translation of the Austrian Civil Code is of great significance for the history of the Croatian legal language and terminology. It was completed in 1953 after Croatia was given autonomous status within the Habsburg Monarchy and Croatian was declared the official language (Vince, 2002: 282). The new national official language had yet to be prepared to enter into the public sphere. It abounded in lexical gaps and had no systematized legal terminology. By creating a number of new Croatian terms to designate Austrian civil law concepts the first translation of the Austrian Civil Code lay the foundation for the modern Croatian legal terminology. However, several decades later the Association of Croatian lawyers expressed its dissatisfaction with the Croatian text complaining of inadequate translations, omissions and inconsistency between the terms used in the first translation and those used in legal practice. Upon the proposal by Franjo Josip Spevec, a distinguished Croatian jurist and law professor, the Association of Croatian lawyers requested the Croatian Government to prepare a new official translation. After the request was rejected, Spevec accepted the offer to revise the old translation for the new private edition (Spevec, 1899: III). The aim of the present study is to examine the improvements of the first Croatian translation of the Austrian Civil Code undertaken by Franjo Josip Spevec in the 1899 private edition. By means of qualitative and quantitative analysis of Spevec’s corrections and revisions it is established which types of translation errors he corrected (terminological, semantic, syntactic or grammar errors and omissions) and how numerous they were. The comments Spevec included in the text are examined to find out the possible causes of the errors. In order to discover if the terms proposed in Spevec’s corrections correspond to those used in legal practice, they are contrasted with the terminology used by the Croatian judiciary between 1848 and 1918 (Husinec, 2020). The results reveal the major shortcomings of the Croatian legal language and terminology used in legislation at the turn of the century, in particular their potential to adequately express the concepts of the modern legal science. They also provide further information about the historical development and standardization of the Croatian legal terminology and language in the late 19th and early 20th century.

standardization, legal language and terminology, Croatian translation of the Austrian Civil Code, Franjo Josip Spevec, late 19th and early 20th century

nije evidentirano