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Article published In:
Corpus-Based Research in Legal and Institutional Translation
Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos
[Translation Spaces 8:1] 2019
► pp. 12–38

When international case-law meets national law

A corpus-based study on Italian system-bound loan words in ECtHR judgments

ORCID logo | Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is an international court set up in 1959 with the aim of ruling on applications alleging violations of the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court’s official languages are English and French, which are also used for delivering and publishing its judgments. In order to decide on the single cases, the ECtHR needs to discuss and recall national and international legislation. This leaves “traces” in the Court’s judgments. The focus of this paper is on one possible type of such traces, i.e. loan words referring to Italian legal concepts and institutions. The paper presents a case study conducted on a corpus of ECtHR judgments published in English. The aims are to propose a methodology for the semi-automatic extraction of loan words and to analyse them in the light of translation techniques.

Keywords: system-bound loan words, national legal terminology, international case-law, European Court of Human Rights, translation techniques
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The European Court of Human Rights and its official languages
  • Legal terminology in international settings
  • Methodology
    • Corpus description
    • Extraction of candidate Italian loan words
    • Manual identification of Italian loan words
    • Types of Italian system-bound loan words
  • Italian system-bound loan words in ECtHR judgments and translation techniques
    • Translation couplets
    • Translation triplets
    • Stand-alone transcription
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.00011.per
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