How do supranational terms transfer into national legal systems?
A corpus-informed study of EU English terminology in consumer protection directives and UK, Irish and Maltese transposing
acts
The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supranational terms related to consumer protection
transfer into domestic legal systems of three English-language jurisdictions (the UK, Ireland and Malta) during the transposition of EU
directives. Transposition is a process of incorporating EU directives into national law and capturing supranational terms during their entry
into national legal systems. We adopt a mixed-method approach of corpus linguistics and legal analysis of terms, working with a corpus of
five directives and their UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts. Distinguishing between a term and a concept level, we propose a
categorisation of transfer techniques arranged along a cline from foreignization to domestication. They involve imports, modifications
(non-denominative and denominative variants), localisations and zero transfer both at the term level and the concept level.
Article outline
- 1.EU supranational terms as a special category of legal terms
- 2.Transposition of directives into the Member States’ national legal systems and its impact on national terminology
- 3.EU law: Consumer protection law as a case in point
- 4.EU English and national legal Englishes
- 5.Material and method
- 6.Analysis of EU terms in transposition into national legal systems
- 6.1Terms which resist travelling: Absences in transposing acts
- 6.2Terms which travel easily: A degree of overlap and imports
- 6.3Modifications and localisations of terms during transposition
- 6.4Transfer of EU concepts during transposition
- 7.Conclusions: Term and concept transfer techniques in transposition
- Notes
-
References
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