engleski

A Comparative Analysis of Collocations in UK and Croatian Company Law

Collocations differ across languages and therefore cause problems in cross-cultural communication and translation. The risk of a collocational error is higher in languages for specific purposes (LSP) than in the general language (Bahumaid 2006: 147). Owing to the asymmetry between legal systems and the system- bound nature of legal terms and phrasemes full equivalence in legal language sometimes does not exist even when two distinct legal systems use the same language. Greater dissimilarities can, undoubtedly, be expected between different languages used in legal systems belonging to distinct legal traditions. A comparative cross- linguistic study of legal collocations can, therefore, be a useful and efficient method to discover areas of similarity and potential errors. This paper examines collocations in Croatian and UK company law, as an area of frequent terminological confusion and misinterpretation. The analysis of collocations of salient company law terms from both languages and legal systems is carried out with AntConc software 3.5.0. Two comparable corpora of national legislation as most prototypical, constitutive, legal genre (Kjær 2000: 139), the UK Companies Act 2006 and the Croatian Companies Act, regulating company law in the UK and Croatia, are used. The aim of the contrastive analysis of identified collocations from traditionally different Croatian and English legal systems and languages is to establish to what degree they semantically and structurally overlap. The qualitative analysis additionally shows which linguistic and extra- linguistic factors cause partial or zero equivalence.

collocations ; Croatian and UK company law ; contrastive analysis ; equivalence

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