engleski

The impact of misused English terminology on translations into other EU languages

The research focuses on cross-lingual analysis of misused legal terminology in English language and its implications on other EU languages (French, Italian, Croatian). Cross-lingual analysis examines the interference of one language with others in terms of message conveyance, relevance of semantic shifts, differences in formulations and the impact of misused English terms on each language and their coverage in the reference language resources. The EU legislation is drafted by non-native speakers following strict norms and equivalence requirements in translation. Thus, good drafting and high translation quality entail achieving the same legal effect, using clear and consistent terminology and avoiding linguistic interference. However, despite the fact that the multilingual translation work is done by highly qualified human translators who have specialized in a domain-specific subject, that there is a multi-step revision process of quality control and a number of multilingual linguistic resources, and despite multilingualism being affirmed as one of the basic principles of the EU, complex legal terminology continues to pose specific challenges. Consequently, this research is based on a list of 101 misused terms which are selected from draft reports from the Court of Auditors and then checked in dictionaries, the British National corpus as well as with native speakers in the UK (Gardner, 2013). The list consists of words and expressions used wrongly in terms of English grammar, semantics and pragmatics. In order to evaluate their spread and implications on translations into other EU languages, Linguee free online tool is used for compiling a list of contextual translation examples for English, French and Italian language. All translation examples contain a hyperlink to corresponding documents which are available at the Eur-Lex database or the UN web- page. As far as Croatian language is concerned, the impact of misused English terminology is checked in a million-word Croatian-English parallel corpus of legislative texts. The newly created list of multilingual translation examples is further verified in the reference language resources: the EU's inter-institutional terminology database IATE and the EU’s multilingual thesaurus, EuroVoc which are constantly being updated and improved. As far as IATE improvements are concerned, IATE statistics for the third quarter of 2013 show that 134 664 changes were made (e.g. insertions, updates and deletions of terms). Our research is based on a preliminary assumption that inaccurate terminology is still present in the above mentioned language resources. Research results are going to be presented in the paper with the aim to contribute to the efforts of ensuring high quality of domain-specific translations, as well as multilingual terminology, lexicography and machine translation.

misused English terminology; translation; EU languages; cross-lingual analysis; legislation; IATE; EuroVoc

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