Variation of legal terms in monolingual and multilingual contexts: Types, distribution, attitudes and causes
Variation is a natural and widespread phenomenon in language: “language is inherently variable, both across time
(diachronically) and at any specific point in time (synchronically)” and it “universally involves alternative forms and
structures that compete with each other in usage” (Krug, Schlüter, and Rosenbach
2013Krug, Manfred, Julia Schlüter, and Anette Rosenbach 2013 “Introduction: Investigating language variation and change.” In Research Methods in Language Variation and Change, edited by Julia Schlüter and Manfred Krug, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 2). The growing awareness of and interest in terminological variation has been observed since the
mid-1990s, with the advent of computerized analyses of terms and the re-orientation of Terminology towards more functional
communicative approaches. The univocity principle, which aimed at reducing synonymy and polysemy in special languages, was
one of the key tenants of the 20th-century mainstream approach to terminology – Wüster’s General Theory of Terminology.
Yet this prescriptive approach failed to deal satisfactorily with variation (L’Homme, Heid, and Sager 2003L’Homme, Marie-Claude, Ulrich Heid, and Juan C. Sager 2003 “Terminology during the past decade (1994–2004): An Editorial statement.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 9(2):151–161.
, 153) and, as numerous studies have shown, terminological variation does
exist in special languages more frequently than expected and is estimated to range from 15% to 35% (Daille 2005Daille, Béatrice 2005 “Variations and application-oriented terminology engineering.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 11(1):181–197.
). Currently, variation has become one of the fundamental research topics in
Terminology (L’Homme 2020L’Homme, Marie-Claude 2020 “Being a privileged witness of twenty years of research in terminology: An editorial
statement.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(1):1–6.
, 3), especially in functionally-oriented
approaches.
Although less eagerly acknowledged, this is also true of legal language, even though arguably to a smaller degree. Variation is in principle considered undesirable in legal language and hence attempted to be curbed and controlled. Yet there is a growing pool of empirical corpus studies which evidence its existence in legal texts. The objective of this chapter is to investigate the concept of variation in relation to legal terminology – its nature, types, distribution and attitudes towards it – and to identify its causes in monolingual and multilingual settings by synthesising and consolidating findings which are scattered across publications on legal language. The examples of variants were extracted from term bases and legal corpora.
1.Clarifying key concepts
Variation, synonymy and polysemyDrawing on a definition of a term in the ISO terminology standards (ISO 1087 2019ISO 1087 2019 Terminology work and terminology science – Vocabulary. Geneva: International Standardization Organization., 3, 7), a legal term can be defined as a designation – a linguistic expression – which
represents a concept, that is a unit of knowledge, in the legal domain. In the ideal world, a concept is evoked by one
term only, that is there is a one-to-one relation of form and meaning, known as univocity or monoreferentiality. When
two or more terms designate the same legal concept (many-to-one relation), this phenomenon is traditionally known as
synonymy,11.It is also known as lexical synonymy as distinguished from the propositional synonymy of syntactic
units (Chromá 2011Chromá, Marta 2011 “Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural
Translation.” Research in Language 9(1):31–50.
, 39). defined in the key terminological ISO 1087 standard as a
“relation between designations in a given natural language representing the same concept” (ISO 1087 2019ISO 1087 2019 Terminology work and terminology science – Vocabulary. Geneva: International Standardization Organization.
, 11). For example, the terms toll and road
fee can evoke the same concept in EU (European Union) law.22.This can be seen in a definition of toll in Article 2(21) of Directive (EU)
2019/520 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 March 2019 on the interoperability of electronic road
toll systems and facilitating cross-border exchange of information on the failure to pay road fees in the Union
OJ L 91, 29.3.2019, where both terms are listed as variants assigned to the same definition
(concept): “‘toll’ or ‘road fee’ means the fee which must be paid by the road user for circulating on a given
road, a road network, a structure, such as a bridge or a tunnel, or a ferry”.
Synonymy is distinguished from another frequent linguistic phenomenon – polysemy when a term represents more than one
concept (de Bessé, Nkwenti-Azeh, and Sager 1997de Bessé, Bruno, Blaise Nkwenti-Azeh, and Juan C. Sager 1997 “Glossary of terms used in terminology.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 4(1):117–156.
, 145), that is a
one-to-many relation, defined as “relation in which a designation represents two or more concepts” (ISO 1087 2019ISO 1087 2019 Terminology work and terminology science – Vocabulary. Geneva: International Standardization Organization.
, 11). For example, the term start of works can
mean “the start of construction works on the investment (…)” or, in the case of take-overs, “the moment of acquiring
the assets directly linked to the acquired establishment”, as they are both defined in the same EU legal act.33.Article 2(23) of Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014 of 17 June 2014 declaring certain categories
of aid compatible with the internal market in application of Articles 107 and 108 of the Treaty OJ L 187
26.6.2014, p. 1.
The term ‘synonymy’ has developed a more specialized meaning in the field of Terminology, which now
prefers to use ‘variation’ and ‘variant’ as superordinate terms. Traditionally, a distinction was made between
synonyms, defined in the Glossary of terms used in terminology, published in the authoritative
Terminology journal, as “[a] word or term which has the same denotation or the same sense as
another” and variants, understood as “a term with an alternative spelling from its headword” […] and “reduced or
expanded forms of terms” (de Bessé, Nkwenti-Azeh, and Sager 1997de Bessé, Bruno, Blaise Nkwenti-Azeh, and Juan C. Sager 1997 “Glossary of terms used in terminology.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 4(1):117–156. , 151,
155). Synonyms were further distinguished as follows: terms are regarded as synonyms if they are interchangeable in
all contexts and as quasi-synonyms if they designate concepts with “almost identical” characteristics (= intensions)
and are interchangeable in some contexts only (ISO 704 2009ISO 704 2009 Terminology work – Principles and methods. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
, 35). In more
recent approaches to variation (Daille 2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
; Fernández-Silva 2016Fernández-Silva, Sabela 2016 “The cognitive and rhetorical role of term variation and its contribution to knowledge construction
in research articles.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 22(1):52–79.
; Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77.
), a variant is
understood more broadly as a superordinate concept which covers not only conceptual sameness but also similarity, with
one of the frequently cited definitions being “a variant of a term is an utterance which is semantically and
conceptually related to an original term” (Daille et al. 1996Daille, Béatrice, Benoît Habert, Christian Jacquemin, and Jean Royauté 1996 “Empirical observation of term variations and principles for their description.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 3(2):197–257.
, 201). Thus,
a variant comprises both the then variation and synonymy – now mainly denominative variants, as well as a more distant
quasi-synonymy – now conceptual variants. As can be seen, even the terminology concerning variation is subject to
variation.
2.The many faces of variation
Types of legal terminological variantsVariation can be classified according to a range of criteria, depending on objectives and applications. They include: formal and conceptual distance, time, acceptability and distribution. Having adapted these criteria to legal terminology, I propose the most relevant types of legal terminological variants in Table 1.
Criterion | Variant type |
---|---|
Formal and conceptual distance to the base term |
Linguistic variant Denominative variant Conceptual variant |
Time |
Synchronic variant Diachronic variant |
Acceptability |
Preferred variant Permitted variant Deprecated variant Proposed variant |
Distribution |
Intrasystemic variant: intratextual, intertextual Intersystemic variant Hybrid variant in multilingual settings |
2.1Conceptual distance between variants
The main distinction which is currently maintained in Terminology is based on: whether variation
affects only the form, i.e., it refers to the same concept, or whether it affects the content, i.e., it refers to
a different albeit closely related concept (Daille 2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 35). The
former is most frequently known as denominative variation while the latter – conceptual variation.
There is some terminological confusion concerning denominative variation. Some scholars understand
it to cover all variants which denote the same concept, e.g. Freixa
(2006)Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77. , while others make a finer distinction between linguistic variants and denominative variants
(Daille 2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
, 35), applying denominative variants only to terms
with different lexicalized forms. I will follow the latter approach since the ease of variant identification is
essential in legal language.
Linguistic variants
Linguistic variants (Daille 2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 35), also known
in some studies as formal variants (e.g. Fernández-Silva 2016Fernández-Silva, Sabela 2016 “The cognitive and rhetorical role of term variation and its contribution to knowledge construction
in research articles.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 22(1):52–79.
, 63),
have a different form “below the lexical level” (Fernández-Silva
2016Fernández-Silva, Sabela 2016 “The cognitive and rhetorical role of term variation and its contribution to knowledge construction
in research articles.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 22(1):52–79.
, 63). These variants use very similar forms (lexemes) with minor modifications. Due to this
similarity of form, they are easy to identify as variants. There are a few categorizations of linguistic
variants, which to some degree depend on the properties of the languages studied. Drawing on Dubuc (1997, qtd.
in Bowker and Hawkins (2006Bowker, Lynne and Shane Hawkins 2006 “Variation in the organization of medical terms: Exploring some motivations for term
choice.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):79–110.
, 81)), Daille (2005)Daille, Béatrice 2005 “Variations and application-oriented terminology engineering.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 11(1):181–197.
and Daille (2017) 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
, I propose
to synthesize these categories for the purposes of legal terms into: (1) orthographic variants, (2)
morphosyntactic variants, and (3) abbreviated/extended forms (see Table 2), with a proviso that some languages might require finer distinctions. Categories are
illustrated with examples sourced in the EU’s IATE (Interactive Terminology for Europe) term base44.
https://iate.europa.eu; variants identified in IATE are documented
with IATE IDs in brackets. or EU law.55.Variants identified in Biel, Biernacka, and Jopek-Bosiacka
(2018)Biel, Łucja, Agnieszka Biernacka, and Anna Jopek-Bosiacka 2018 “Collocations of Terms in EU Competition Law: A Corpus Analysis of EU English
Collocations.” In Language and Law: The Role of Language and Translation in EU Competition Law, edited by Silvia Marino, Łucja Biel, Martina Bajčić and Vilelmini Sosoni, 249–274. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
and confirmed in the Juremy (juremy.com) search engine.
Linguistic variation | Examples |
---|---|
Orthographic variants |
case law / case-law (IATE ID 772653) trade mark (IATE ID 851415) / trademark (IATE ID 1253839) wholly-owned subsidiary (IATE ID 1754985) / wholly owned subsidiary (IATE ID 1390653) micro-enterprise / microenterprise (IATE ID 1873332) penalise / penalize failure to fulfil/fulfill the undertaking |
Morphosyntactic variants |
Morphological variants statutory law / statute law (IATE ID 886050) unmargined derivative / non-margined derivative (IATE ID 3572228) Inflection passing-on / pass-on of overcharges buying cartel / buyers’ cartel law of tort / law of torts (IATE ID 1129834) |
Syntactic variants, e.g. permutation contract of employment / employment contract (IATE ID 760910) financial derivative instrument / derivative financial instrument (IATE ID 856223) asylum application / application for asylum (IATE ID 3583972) |
|
Mixed syntactic and morphological variants vaccine confidence / confidence in vaccination (IATE ID 3593277) legal heir / heir at law / heir by operation of law (IATE ID 3537946) misconduct in office / official misconduct (IATE ID 3556579) closed corporation / closely-held corporation (IATE ID 81148) contractual freedom / freedom of contract (IATE ID 1395335) |
|
Abbreviated and extended forms |
Abbreviated forms and short forms:
financial derivative instrument / derivative instrument / derivative (IATE ID 856223) post-authorisation safety study / post-authorisation study (IATE ID 2251252) European Union acquis / Union acquis / acquis (IATE ID 878385) Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 on prudential requirements for credit institutions and investment firms and amending Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 / Capital Requirements Regulation / CRR (IATE ID 3547679) clipped forms:
middle-capitalisation company / mid-cap company / mid-cap (IATE ID 931591) abbreviations:
|
Extended forms estate tail / estate in tail / fee tail estate / estate in fee tail (IATE ID 68289) wear / wear and tear (IATE ID 1209118) / normal wear and tear (IATE ID 843269) / usual wear and tear (IATE ID 1647561) |
Both orthographic and morphosyntactic variants involve typically minor modifications of the
form of terms while maintaining the same lexemes (or their lemmas). In general, the longer the term, the more
variation it invites. Orthographic variants (also known as spelling variants) involve a segmentation of
compound terms, e.g. hyphenation or spacing, as well as spelling variants related to, for example,
capitalization, normative spelling, misspelling (Daille 2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ,
52–53). Morphosyntactic variation comprises morphological variants with different morphemes in constituents,
syntactic variants with differences in an internal structure of terms, for example permutation which reverses
the order of constituents but preserves their dependency relationship, and mixed variants which combine
changes in both morphemes and the local grammar of
a term (Daille 2005Daille, Béatrice 2005 “Variations and application-oriented terminology engineering.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 11(1):181–197.
,
184–185). It is not infrequent that one variant, known as the base term (Daille et al. 1996Daille, Béatrice, Benoît Habert, Christian Jacquemin, and Jean Royauté 1996 “Empirical observation of term variations and principles for their description.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 3(2):197–257.
, 205), is dominant while other variants have a significantly lower frequency.
For example, a study by Biel et al. (2018)Biel, Łucja, Agnieszka Biernacka, and Anna Jopek-Bosiacka 2018 “Collocations of Terms in EU Competition Law: A Corpus Analysis of EU English
Collocations.” In Language and Law: The Role of Language and Translation in EU Competition Law, edited by Silvia Marino, Łucja Biel, Martina Bajčić and Vilelmini Sosoni, 249–274. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
identified the base form
trade mark with a frequency of 350 occurrences, while the other variant, e.g.
trademark, only 23 times in the EU competition law corpus. See also Prieto Ramos (this
volume) for similar evidence.
Abbreviated forms (termed after ISO 704 2009ISO 704 2009 Terminology work – Principles and methods. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.,
52–53) cover short forms, clipped forms and abbreviations. They are mainly motivated by the principle of
linguistic economy (ISO 704 2009ISO 704 2009 Terminology work – Principles and methods. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
, 40) to ensure the ease and
efficiency of use by introducing shorter forms, in particular when a term has a (excessively) long multi-word
form and is impracticable to use. Abbreviations, especially initialisms, seem to be a productive category in
institutional discourse, when referring to proper names, such as institutions, programmes, administrative
measures, legal acts as well as technical terms used in legislation. Abbreviations are often signalled as a
variant in a text, e.g. ‘harmonised index of consumer prices’ or ‘HICP’ means
the comparable index of consumer prices produced by each Member State 66.Regulation (EU) 2016/792 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 May 2016 on harmonised
indices of consumer prices and the house price index, and repealing Council Regulation (EC) No 2494/95. OJ
L 135, 24.5.2016, p. 11–38.
(emphasis added).
The opposite – extended forms (also known as expansions (Daille 2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. )) – explicate and foreground certain aspects of a concept which may otherwise be
implicit, e.g.
normal wear and tear as opposed to wear and tear,
although ‘normal’ is part of the meaning of wear and tear as can be seen in its IATE entry
(ID 1209118) based on a Wikipedia definition: “damage that naturally and inevitably occurs as a result of
normal wear or aging” (emphasis added). This is also visible in the BLD
[Black’s Law Dictionary] definition of wear and tear: “[d]eterioration
caused by ordinary use; the depreciation of property resulting from its reasonable use”
(Garner 2009 ed. 2009 Black’s Law Dictionary. 9th ed. St. Paul, MN: West.
, 1731; emphasis added). Given a broad range of
variants this term triggers, as evidenced in legal dictionaries, e.g.
usual wear and tear, fair wear and tear,
reasonable wear and tear and
natural wear and tear, there is a clear communicative need to emphasize
this aspect of the concept and to make it more semantically transparent.
Denominative variants
Denominative variation, also known as synonymy, terminological synonymy, lexical variation
sensu stricto (Freixa and Fernández-Silva
2017Freixa, Judit and Sabela Fernández-Silva 2017 “Terminological variation and the unsaturability of concepts.” In Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation, edited by Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley and Aurélie Picton, 155–180. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ), occurs when one concept has more than one denomination – lexicalized form (Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77.
, 51). Due to the dissimilarity of form, this type of variation is usually
more difficult to identify. Denominative variation can be partial when only one constituent differs and full
when all the constituents are substituted by synonyms. Take for example
maritime law which has partial variants:
marine law and law of the sea
(IATE ID 1593245). An example of a full variant is ex officio and as of
right, both of which are defined as “holding one office by virtue of or because of the holding of
another office” (IATE ID 792874). A term may have both partial and full variants – action for
damages has a few partial variants: action for compensation,
action for pecuniary reparation
(IATE ID 1086966),
claim for damages (IATE ID 1129967), and the full variant
claim for compensation
(IATE ID 1129967). Denominative variation is also found in the verb collocations of legal terms,
e.g. to grant / award an aid; to conclude / enter into an agreement; to form / establish a
cartel in EU competition law (Biel, Biernacka, and
Jopek-Bosiacka 2018Biel, Łucja, Agnieszka Biernacka, and Anna Jopek-Bosiacka 2018 “Collocations of Terms in EU Competition Law: A Corpus Analysis of EU English
Collocations.” In Language and Law: The Role of Language and Translation in EU Competition Law, edited by Silvia Marino, Łucja Biel, Martina Bajčić and Vilelmini Sosoni, 249–274. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
, 269).
A concept may trigger a range of both linguistic and denominative variants. For example, contract of employment can trigger a linguistic variant based on permutation employment contract and a range of partial denominative variants: work contract, labour contract (IATE ID 760910) and service contract. Similarly, trafficking has extended variants illicit/illegal trafficking and denominative variants illicit trade and illegal trade as shown in Chart 1. The IATE entry treats all the variants as referring to the same concept although one could argue that variants with illicit foreground other aspects of the concept (i.e. impropriety)77.“illicit, adj.” = not authorized or allowed; improper, irregular; esp. not sanctioned by law, rule, or custom; unlawful, forbidden. OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/91445. Accessed 22 March 2022. than those with illegal (forbidden by law).
Conceptual variants
The last group of variants comprises conceptual variants. They refer to related concepts, the
characteristics of which overlap to some degree. Thus, these are not identical concepts and conceptual
variants have a larger distance to the base term. A typical example of conceptual variation is a hypernym
(superordinate) – hyponym (subordinate) relation between concepts, e.g. agreement – tenancy
agreement – assured shorthold tenancy agreement, where the former is the most general category
which subsumes the latter – its subtypes. Most concepts have this type of generic-specific relationship with
other concepts. Conceptual variants may also involve partial overlaps in the characteristics of concepts. For
example, related company, affiliated company, associated company, subsidiary company are
closely related variants which denote different levels of ownership and control held by a parent company.
These variants involve a change of modifier with a different defining feature and hence involve a medium
distance (Fernández-Silva 2016Fernández-Silva, Sabela 2016 “The cognitive and rhetorical role of term variation and its contribution to knowledge construction
in research articles.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 22(1):52–79. , 64). Changes in the head involve a
change of category and usually involve a maximum distance (Fernández-Silva
2016Fernández-Silva, Sabela 2016 “The cognitive and rhetorical role of term variation and its contribution to knowledge construction
in research articles.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 22(1):52–79.
, 64). For example, the US variants corporation, company, partnership denote
distinct types of business entities which differ in the limitation of liability, taxation and regulatory
duties. Interestingly, this concept field is often represented by a single concept, e.g.
Gesellschaft (DE), société (FR), spółka (PL), in
continental (European) company law.
The distinction between conceptual and denominative variants is not always clear-cut (Daille 2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 64), especially in the legal domain. The distance to the
base term is a matter of degree: for example, concepts may differ as to peripheral or central characteristics
and users – legal experts – may differ in their assessment as to whether variants refer to the same concept or
to different concepts. The denominative/conceptual variation resembles the distinction between full (also
known as strict, absolute, complete) synonyms and partial (also known as near, close) synonyms in linguistics
(see Chromá 2011Chromá, Marta 2011 “Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural
Translation.” Research in Language 9(1):31–50.
, 40–42, Goźdź-Roszkowski 2013Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław 2013 “Exploring near-synonymous terms in legal language. A corpus-based, phraseological
perspective.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 12:94–109.
, 96–97 for an overview) – in Chromá’s words, this distinction reflects a
“fluctuating degree of sameness/similarity” (2011Chromá, Marta 2011 “Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural
Translation.” Research in Language 9(1):31–50.
, 41). As
linguistic research shows, full synonymy is rare in language and variants are usually distributed in different
contexts (see Section 3). Full synonymy, where variants are fully
interchangeable in all contexts, is “exceptional” in legal language (Chromá 2011Chromá, Marta 2011 “Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural
Translation.” Research in Language 9(1):31–50.
, 41). Thus, instead, some semasiologically- and/or linguistically-oriented
terminological studies classify variants along a cline from a minimum to maximum semantic distance, with
denominative variants involving the former and conceptual variants – the latter (Fernández-Silva 2016Fernández-Silva, Sabela 2016 “The cognitive and rhetorical role of term variation and its contribution to knowledge construction
in research articles.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 22(1):52–79.
, 63). In this
approach, even if denominative variants evoke the same concept, their meaning may slightly differ due to the
profiling of different aspects of the concept (hence the minimum distance).
2.2Time
Diachronic and synchronic variantsConsidering the criterion of time, variants can be synchronic or diachronic (also termed as
chronological variants, Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77. , 55). As all types of terminology,
legal terminology is dynamic and subject to change over time. Synchronic variants co-exist in time; for example,
corporation and company are contemporary US and UK synchronic variants.
Synchronic variants are frequent in new emerging domains where terminology is under formation and hence unstable.
One such area is fintech terminology – for example the term blockchain is also spelt as
block-chain, block chain and Block Chain in a number of legal and
administrative documents in EUR-Lex.
Diachronic variants were used in the past; thus, they usually do not compete with newer variants.
To illustrate, the common law offence of larceny is a diachronic variant replaced by a broader
umbrella concept of theft and related offences in the 1968 Theft Act in the United Kingdom. The
term larceny is still used in some jurisdictions, for example Australia, the USA or the Bailiwick
of Jersey, in the original meaning of theft of personal property with an asportation (i.e. carrying the item
away), in an extended sense or interchangeably with theft. Thus, diachronic variants in one jurisdiction may be
synchronic variants in related jurisdictions. Additionally, diachronic variants may still be occasionally and
habitually used in looser language and less official contexts but they are not ‘authoritative’ terms. More
recently, diachronic variation may be attributed to the Plain Language Movement, which aims at modernising and
simplifying legal language (Adler 2012Adler, Mark 2012 “The Plain Language Movement.” In The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law, edited by L. M. Solan and P. M. Tiersma. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online. ). For example, the Civil
Procedure Rules 1998 which were introduced in 1999 in England and Wales reformed some fundamental procedural
terminology by replacing long-standing archaic or opaque terms with their plain(er) language variants intended to
make them more comprehensible to the general public, e.g. plaintiff → claimant, writ → claim form,
pleading → statement of case, minor/infant → child, subpoena → witness summons, guardian ad litem → litigation
friend, ex parte → without notice, Anton Pillar order → search order (Galdia 2009Galdia, Marcus 2009 Legal Linguistics. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
, 128). While the previous terms might still be in use in some contexts, they
are diachronic variants in England and Wales from a legal point of view. Diachronic variants are sometimes marked
in term bases, e.g. as ‘obsolete’ in IATE (see Section 2.3).
2.3Acceptability of variants
Variants may be categorized according to their acceptability ratings. They may be listed “in order
of preference” in a terminology resource as a guide to users with the help of labels, such as preferred, admitted, deprecated and obsolete terms (ISO 1087 2019ISO 1087 2019 Terminology work and terminology science – Vocabulary. Geneva: International Standardization Organization., 9–10). An example of this categorization may be found in
the IATE term base, which adds one more label – proposed – to evaluate variants and explains the labels as
follows:
Preferred The best term (of its ‘term type’) to use in an EU text. A term may be ‘preferred’ because it is intrinsically better than the other terms, or because it has been chosen to ensure consistency in EU texts.
Admitted A term which is correct, but for which better synonyms exist.
Deprecated A term which is widely used, and is therefore likely to appear in EU documents or which appears in an apparently authoritative source, but which should be used neither in originals nor in translations because it is not correct and fit for use in EU texts.
Obsolete A term which was previously used to denote the concept, but is no longer in use (e.g. the ‘Bank Identifier Code’ is now called the ‘Business Identifier Code’, see IATE:926311).
Proposed A term or denomination which has been proposed but not yet fully adopted.88.IATE User’s Handbook (version 30.6.2020), p. 25, https://iate.europa.eu/assets/IATE_Handbook_public.pdf.
Taking into account acceptability, this scale could actually be reduced to four categories – preferred, admitted, deprecated, proposed – since ‘obsolete’ could be regarded as a subtype of deprecated variants, the use of which is not recommended. An example of how the labels are used in IATE is shown in Chart 2, where Polish equivalents of climate change are marked as preferred, admitted and deprecated.
These labels help to standardize drafters’ and, more frequently, translators’ choices among variants.
3.Distribution of variants
Distributional distanceThe distribution criterion reflects the physical textual distance in which variants appear and, hence, how they compete with each other. The distribution of legal variants takes into account the type of legal system since it provides the conceptual frames of reference and meaning construal. Thus, a key distinction should be made between variants which are distributed (1) in the same legal system – intrasystemic variants, (2) in different legal systems – intersystemic variants, and (3) in multilingual context – hybrid variants (see Table 1).
3.1Intrasystemic variants
Intrasystemic variants function in the same legal system. They can occur in the same text (intratextual variants) or across different texts (intertextual variants).
3.1.1Intratextual intrasystemic variants
Variants at the phrase level
Synonym-stringsPhrase-level variants which consist in synonymous repetitions, such as sole and
exclusive; right, title and interest; indemnify and hold harmless, are frequently discussed
in the literature and are known under a range of names – doublets, triplets, synonym-strings (Garner 2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 292), coupled synonyms (Šarčević 1997Šarčević, Susan 1997 New Approach to Legal Translation. The Hague: Kluwer Law International.
, 183), synonymical chains (Chromá 2011Chromá, Marta 2011 “Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural
Translation.” Research in Language 9(1):31–50.
, 42), etc. They are a distinctive feature of common-law legal English (see e.g.
Alcaraz Varó and Hughes 2002Alcaraz Varó, Enrique and Brian Hughes 2002 Legal Translation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.
, 9; Mattila 2006Mattila, H. E. S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Hampshire: Ashgate.
, 111–112; Mellinkoff
1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
, 120). Synonym-strings are multi-word expressions which comprise two or more synonymous
variants of constituent terms. They usually have different etymology, are joined mainly with the
coordinator ‘and’ (hence regarded as a subtype of binomials, Gustafsson 1984Gustafsson, Marita 1984 “The syntactic features of binomial expressions in legal English.” Text – Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 4(1–3):123–142.
) and are retrieved as a whole, that is they are treated as a single term
evoking one concept. Synonym-strings are historical artefacts resulting from code-mixing in the Middle
Ages and Renaissance when bilingual synonyms were composed first for clarity “as necessary translation” of
a foreign French or Latin term, and later as a then fashionable rhetorical device – a rhythmic “ornament”
“sometimes spiced with alliteration” (Garner 2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
, 292–293;
Mellinkoff 1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
, 120–121). For example, English and French
combinations include goods and chattels; acknowledge and confess; fit and proper; give, devise and
bequeath while English and Latin combinations include: will and testament, act and
deed, French and Latin combinations being: aid and abet, null and void, cease and
desist; rest, residue and remainder (Mellinkoff
1963Mellinkoff, David 1963 The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
, 121–122). The rhythmicity of synonym-strings made them ritualistic and solemn and added
to the “dignity of legal language” (Mattila 2006Mattila, H. E. S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Hampshire: Ashgate.
, 234). They
are still used routinely as a coupling of synonyms or hypernyms (referring to superordinate concepts) and
hyponyms (referring to subordinate concepts). The latter can be illustrated with the doublet terms
and conditions, regarded as one of “the most common redundancies in legal drafting” with
terms being broad enough to cover both (Garner
2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
, 872). For example, Jowitt’s Dictionary of English Law defines
terms as:
Terms. A reference to a term of a contract or other agreement is a reference to a distinct provision or part. The phrase “terms and conditions” is found throughout the statute book, despite the fact that a condition is merely a particular kind of term.(Greenberg 2010Greenberg, Daniel ed. 2010 Jowitt’s Dictionary of English Law. 3rd ed. London: Thomson Reuters.
, 2244, emphasis added)
Thus, a term is a hypernym covering a condition. It
is a particular kind of term: “a major term”, the breach of which is “a fundamental breach of the contract
and entitles the injured party to treat it as discharged”, or a condition precedent or subsequent (Law and Martin 2009Law, Jonathan and Elizabeth A. Martin eds. 2009 A Dictionary of Law. 7th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , 118). Since conditions are subsumed by
terms, terms and conditions are redundant but are entrenched in usage.
In addition to highly-fixed formulaic synonym-strings which evoke single concepts,
phrase-level variants may be associated with an all-embracing drafting style where all possible conceptual
and denominative variants are enumerated side by side in “improvised strings” (Adams 2013Adams, Kenneth A. 2013 A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Bar Association., 72), e.g.
No party hereto shall be deemed as a consequence of any act, delay, failure, omission, forbearance or other indulgences granted from time to time by any other party hereto […] to have modified, changed, amended, terminated, rescinded, or superseded any of the terms of this Agreement, unless such waiver, modification, amendment, change, termination, rescission, or supersession is express, in writing and signed by the party […]
where the underlined strings reflect an attempt to exhaustively cover concept fields of ‘act’ and ‘change’.
Synonym-strings may trigger additional linguistic variation with attempts at the reduction of redundancy: terms and conditions and the elliptical forms terms and/or (rare) conditions as well as last will and testament which coexists with will.
Variants beyond the phrase level
Intratextual variants are found in the same legal text. As research shows,
the dispersion of variants and their frequency of use is dependent on the level of specialization of
genres and registers, sometimes referred to as vertical variation or register-dependent variation:
“terminological density and consistency decrease as texts become less specialized, while conceptual and
denominative variation becomes more frequent” (Fernández-Silva
2016Fernández-Silva, Sabela 2016 “The cognitive and rhetorical role of term variation and its contribution to knowledge construction
in research articles.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 22(1):52–79. , 57–58).
Legal genres are typically grouped into a hierarchical system of genres. One such
classification by Bhatia (2006Bhatia, Vijay K. 2006 “Legal Genres.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by Keith Brown, 1–7. Oxford: Elsevier. , 6–7) divides legal genres into
primary genres (legal acts) and derived genres which cover secondary genres of adjudication, target genres
used in legal practice (contracts, court case documents), and enabling (pedagogical) genres produced by
academics and legal professionals. These core legal genres need to be supplemented by peripheral genres,
such as administrative documents (certificates), press releases, oral genres, entertaining genres (crime
fiction, TV series), web and social media genres (websites), which are often intended for semi-experts and
non-specialist recipients (Biel 2022 2022 “Translating Legal Texts.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Translation, edited by Kirsten Malmkjær, 379–400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
). Intratextual variation – in particular linguistic and denominative
variation – can be expected to be minimized in legislation and target genres, where it would violate the
consistency principle (see Section 4). Secondary genres, such as
judgments, are more interpretive and contextualized, which allows for stylistic and cohesive variation
(Biel and Koźbiał 2020Biel, Łucja and Dariusz Koźbiał 2020 “How do translators handle (near-) synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into
the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology.” Estudios de Traducción 10:69–90.
). This can also be extended to
enabling genres with pedagogical functions. As less specialized, peripheral genres may be expected to show
the highest degree of intratextual variation.
Intratextual variation may also be found in interdiscursive documents. For example,
enacting parts of EU legal acts are preceded by extensive preambles which present the rationale for a
given legal act, political considerations and legislative intent and are nonprescriptive as opposed to
enacting parts. Preambles tend to be written in a more argumentative style and use terms less rigorously.
Thus, variants may be scattered across preambles and enacting parts, for example linguistic variants:
action for damages / damages action, buyers’ cartel and buying cartel, passing-on / pass-on of
overcharges in Directive 2014/104/EU,99.Directive 2014/104/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 November 2014 on certain
rules governing actions for damages under national law for infringements of the competition law provisions of the
Member States and of the European Union Text with EEA relevance, OJ L 349, 5.12.2014, p. 1–19.
or
denominative variants: typical consumer and average consumer, out-of-court
settlement alongside amicable settlement in EU consumer directives (Biel and Doczekalska 2020Biel, Łucja and Agnieszka Doczekalska 2020 “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.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(2):184–212. ). Interdiscursivity is also found in
quotations, e.g. in judgments, from underlying documents, which serve as evidence – opinions, reports,
statements, with their own discursive universe.
Another case of variation is related to cognitive scenarios or frames terms are
associated with – such associations may result in the excluding or overlapping combinatory properties of
variants. For example, the Polish Code of Commercial Partnerships and Companies establishes distinct
terminology when referring to similar concepts connected with two main types of Polish companies:
spółka z ograniczoną odpowiedzialnością [private limited liability company] and
spółka akcyjna [public company]: the former has umowa spółki
[articles of association, lit. company agreement], udziały [shares] and
wspólnik [member] while the latter has statut [statute],
akcje [shares – a borrowing of foreign origin] and akcjonariusz
[shareholder], respectively. The corresponding UK companies have a unified terminology regardless of the
company type (articles of association, shares, member). A more complex set of variants –
breach, infringement, violation, contravention – and their collocations were examined
by Goźdź-Roszkowski (2013)Goźdź-Roszkowski, Stanisław 2013 “Exploring near-synonymous terms in legal language. A corpus-based, phraseological
perspective.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 12:94–109., who demonstrated exclusions but
also overlaps and domain specificity in their distribution.
3.1.2Intertextual intrasystemic variants
Law is a complex system of rules and legal documents which lay down, apply and discuss these
rules, have their own hierarchies and strong intertextual links both vertical (to the primary genre) and
horizontal (to preceding documents of the same genre). Within the primary genre of legal acts in a national
context, the constitution and codes unify concepts and have terminological primacy over lower-ranking
secondary acts, such as ordinary statutes (acts of parliament) or ordinances issued by the government, which
should ensure terminological consistency with the former (Bąkowski et al.
2003Bąkowski, Tomasz, Piotr Bielski, Krzysztof Kaszubowski, Marcin Kokoszczyński, Jakub Stelina, Jarosław Warylewski, and Grzegorz Wierczyński 2003 Zasady techniki prawodawczej. Komentarz. Online: ABC Lex Omega.). This is not always the case as lower-ranking statutes tend to be of lower quality, one of
the markers of which is terminological inconsistency (Malinowski
2006Malinowski, Andrzej 2006 Polski język prawny. Wybrane zagadnienia. Warszawa: LexisNexis.
, 204 with reference to Polish). With respect to the primary genre in the EU context, treaties
(primary legislation) name fundamental concepts and their terminology has priority over secondary legislation
terminology (i.e. regulations, directives, decisions), which is expected to be consistent with the former and
with preceding legal acts of the same genre (cf. Biel 2014 2014 Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
, 58),
which again is not always applied rigorously. For example, Dannemann notes that EU terminology “is not exactly
noted for its consistency”, exemplifying it with the consumer’s contractual partner in consumer transactions,
which is referred to under a range of names in EU law: trader, professional, supplier, professional
supplier with “no indication (…) in the acquis for different meanings being attached to those
different terms” (2008Dannemann, Gerhard 2008 “Drafting Principles of Existing European Contract Law.” In Drafting Legislation: A Modern Approach, edited by Constantin Stefanou and Helen Xanthaki, 165–176. Aldershot: Ashgate.
, 175).
Expectations of terminological continuity with the primary genre extend to lower-ranking
legal genres, in particular target genres, since continued terms are points of access capable of activating
the relevant knowledge structures and scenarios behind such terms. Continued terms provide clear reference to
legal acts. Target genres are likely to be more susceptible to variation due to their more scattered, private
and idiosyncratic nature which escapes (full) standardization. Moreover, target genres, e.g. contracts, are
sometimes drafted by the parties themselves rather than lawyers, who may introduce semi-legal variants of
legal terms proper. For example, the Polish umowa sprzedaży [sales contract], named and
defined in the Civil Code, has a popular variant umowa kupna-sprzedaży [purchase-sales
contract], used frequently in vehicle purchase contracts alongside less frequent umowa kupna
[purchase contract], even though these terms are not used in Polish law. Chromá makes a useful distinction
between: prescriptive terms which “are defined by and contained in statutes” and – in common law – “developed
through case law” and descriptive terms which are marked by a “degree of contextual and linguistic specificity
and used in everyday legal practice including professionalisms as a part of legal jargon” (2011Chromá, Marta 2011 “Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural
Translation.” Research in Language 9(1):31–50. , 41). In some jurisprudence traditions terms are viewed narrowly
as legal terms only if they are used in legal acts (Malinowski
2006Malinowski, Andrzej 2006 Polski język prawny. Wybrane zagadnienia. Warszawa: LexisNexis.
, 153), that is if they are prescriptive terms. As Chromá argues, prescriptive terms and their
corresponding descriptive terms are not full synonyms because they are distributed differently.
Variants may be used in different branches of law in which case they are “usually statutorily
prescribed”, i.e., to produce cause with reference to workers’ compensation and to
procure cause (of a sale) in real-estate brokerage (Garner
2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 139). They may be developed by different discourse communities behind respective legal
genres, e.g. a conveyance formula used to transfer an ownership: convey and warrant / grant, bargain,
and sell in a warranty deed and remise, release and forever quitclaim / convey and
quitclaim in a quitclaim deed (Garner 2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
, 942).
Enabling genres are more tolerant of intertextual variation. This may be illustrated with the
legal academic genres, such as research papers and textbooks. One of the hotly debated topics of Comparative
Law is the concept of legal transplant. It refers to a transfer of legal concepts or rules
from one legal system to another (Watson 1974Watson, Alan 1974 Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.) and uses a medical
metaphor of organ transfer and at the same time the botanical metaphor of plant removal from one place to
another. Since this term has been criticized as misleading, competing denominations were proposed, such as
legal irritant, legal transfer, legal translation, cultural translation, legal transposition,
migration, borrowing, standardization, legal transformation, diffusion, circulation, cross-fertilization,
cross-pollination, reception, inoculation, infiltration (Örücü 2002Örücü, Esin 2002 “Law as Transposition.” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 51(2):205–223.
, 207; Perju 2012Perju, Vlad 2012 “Constitutional Transplants, Borrowing, and Migrations.” In Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, edited by Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó, 1304–1327. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
, 1306; Doczekalska and Biel 2022Doczekalska, Agnieszka and Łucja Biel 2022 “Interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation in law.” In Translation Beyond Translation Studies, edited by Kobus Marais, 99–118. London: Bloomsbury.
), to the point that it has been called “the
battle of metaphors” (Perju 2012Perju, Vlad 2012 “Constitutional Transplants, Borrowing, and Migrations.” In Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, edited by Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó, 1304–1327. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
, 1306–1307). This productivity of
variants is cognitively motivated by a search for a term which optimally explains this complex legal
phenomenon and highlights its most relevant aspects, in particular adaptations in the receiving legal culture
(cf. Doczekalska and Biel 2022Doczekalska, Agnieszka and Łucja Biel 2022 “Interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation in law.” In Translation Beyond Translation Studies, edited by Kobus Marais, 99–118. London: Bloomsbury.
).
Due to the interdisciplinary nature of law, which regulates various domains and is used by experts from other fields, drafters sometimes acknowledge the existence of habitual, commercial or alternative usage in a given domain, e.g. ‘household spin-extractor’, also known commercially as ‘spin-drier’ 1010.Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) No 392/2012 supplementing Directive 2010/30/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council with regard to energy labelling of household tumble driers, OJ L 123, 9.5.2012, p. 1–26. or: Shipmaster means the person on-board of the ship being in command and having the authority to take all decisions pertaining to navigation and ship management. (Synonyms: captain, skipper, boat master) (emphasis added).1111.Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1744 of 17 September 2019 on technical specifications for electronic ship reporting in inland navigation and repealing Regulation (EU) No 164/2010, OJ L 273, 25.10.2019, p. 1–182.
Finally, variation is more common in less specialized genres, e.g. semi-legal, journalistic,
business or colloquial language, where variants are adjustments to the communicative situation and
participants. Take for example a legislative Polish term for a merger łączenie się [joining]
as used in the Code of Commercial Partnerships and Companies and its commonly used variant
fuzja in a less formal (e.g. spoken or journalistic) legal language. Variants are also developed in plain language, e.g. all other
property instead of legalese rest, residue, and remainder (Garner 2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 765), as well as in everyday language, e.g. the Polish legal term
przysposobienie [adoption], derived from a rare dated verb, has a popular
general-language variant adopcja. Another area is prison slang, the counter-language of the
criminal fraternity with bonding functions, which is typically marked by high variation, e.g. Mattila reports
that Finnish prison slang has about 70 terms denoting a police officer (2006Mattila, H. E. S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Hampshire: Ashgate.
, 6). English terms with the highest number of variants in IATE are colloquial names for
drugs – LSD (22 variants, ID 1399915) and heroin (16 variants, ID 1399804).
Thus, from a genre and register perspective, variants are: legislative (statutory, prescriptive), legal non-legislative (descriptive), semi-legal and non-legal (general, colloquial, slang, etc.).
3.2Intersystemic variation
Intersystemic variants (known in other domains as geographical variants, Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77. , 55) are distributed in different legal systems; hence, they do not compete
with each other. Legal concepts are autonomous and system-bound (Šarčević
1997Šarčević, Susan 1997 New Approach to Legal Translation. The Hague: Kluwer Law International.
, 232); they are a product of a specific legal system where their meaning is contextualized.
Although legal systems across the world do share some concepts, their meaning is rarely identical due to the
standardization and artificial fixing of meaning through definitions and case law, and different frames of
reference (Biel 2014 2014 Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
, 40). Furthermore, in the case of pluricentric
languages, which are used in more than one legal system, for example English (e.g. England and Wales/UK, Ireland,
USA, Canada), French (France, Canada, Switzerland), German (Germany, Austria), Spanish (Spain, Argentina,
Uruguay), corresponding concepts may be activated by different denominations developed by respective systems. To
illustrate, one of the branches with similar concepts is company law (UK) / corporate law (US) which has distinct
terminology in the UK and the USA, e.g. company v corporation, general meeting v
shareholders’ meeting, articles of association v articles of incorporation,
promoter v incorporator, insolvency v bankruptcy, merger by a formation of a
new company v consolidation. The variation of US terminology is even more complex as
corporate law is regulated at the state rather than federal level but subject to recommendations in the form of
model acts. Examples can be found in Monteagudo Medina’s (2019)Monteagudo Medina, Mary Ann 2019 “A corpus-based study of terminological variation in business incorporation documents from the
United States and Peru.” Translation Spaces 8(1):117–143.
study
into the names of incorporation documents of US corporations (articles of incorporation, certificate of
incorporation, articles of organization, charter) and US limited liability companies
(articles of organization, certificate of formation, certificate of organization). These are,
argues Monteagudo Medina (2019Monteagudo Medina, Mary Ann 2019 “A corpus-based study of terminological variation in business incorporation documents from the
United States and Peru.” Translation Spaces 8(1):117–143.
, 132), cognitive denominative variants
“because each variant carries the same concept with a degree of specificity or specialization (the type of
business organization)”.
3.3Hybrid multilingual settings
This Section covers special cases when variants co-exist in multilingual settings, such as the application of supranational law in national legal systems, including transposition, and various types of translation.
Multilingual law
Multilingual law will be discussed with the example of EU law, which is autonomous
supranational law enacted in 24 authentic language versions and expected to be uniformly applied and
interpreted in 27 EU member states. It is drafted at the supranational level in EU institutions but becomes
“an integral part of the Member States’ legal systems” (Doczekalska
2018Doczekalska, Agnieszka 2018 “Legal Languages in Contact: EU Legislative Drafting and Its Consequences for Judicial
Interpretation.” In Language and Law: The Role of Language and Translation in EU Competition Law, edited by Silvia Marino, Łucja Biel, Martina Bajčić and Vilelmini Sosoni, 163–178. Cham: Springer. , 175), where it is applied (Kjær 2007Kjær, Anne Lise 2007 “Legal Translation in the European Union: A Research Field in Need of a New Approach.” In Language and the Law: International Outlooks, edited by Krzysztof Kredens and Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski, 69–95. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
). Regulations
have a general application, are binding in their entirety and directly applicable while directives are binding
as to the objective to be achieved and are transposed, usually by way of amending the existing legislation or
enacting new instruments in member states (intralingual translation). EU supranational terms are a special
category of legal terms as they are required to “travel” from a supranational context to national ones where
they are confronted with and co-exist with domestic law variants (Biel and
Doczekalska 2020Biel, Łucja and Agnieszka Doczekalska 2020 “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.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(2):184–212.
, 185–186). This creates complex interlinks between supranational and domestic
variants. For example, Polish language versions of EU regulations mainly use the term
przedsiębiorstwo [undertaking] to refer to a business entity, which in Polish law usually
denotes a specific type of entity, e.g. przedsiębiorstwo państwowe [state-owned enterprise],
while national legislation uses przedsiębiorca [entrepreneur] in this sense (Biel and Sosoni 2019Biel, Łucja and Vilelmini Sosoni 2019 “EU legal culture and translation in the era of globalisation: the hybridisation of EU terminology
on the example of competition law.” In Legal Linguistics beyond the borders: Language and Law in a World of Media, Globalisation and Social
Conflicts. Relaunching the International Language and Law Association, edited by Friedemann Vogel, 208–229. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot.
, 218). Interestingly, EU regulations also
occasionally use the variant przedsiębiorca, albeit ca. 15 times less frequently. See also
Brannan (this volume) on the supranational and national variants of expulsion.
Transposition
A further potential for variation is created during transposition when national drafters
decide how (if at all) they will adjust EU terminology to the national concept system. This differs across
countries as some opt for the copy-out technique which copies EU provisions nearly verbatim while others for
elaboration – rewriting – in line with the conventions of domestic legal language and its conceptual framework
(Biel and Doczekalska 2020Biel, Łucja and Agnieszka Doczekalska 2020 “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.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(2):184–212. , 191–192). Transposition requires a
transfer of supranational legal concepts into national legal systems, which can have a range of
foreignising-domesticating forms both at the term and concept level, such as a verbatim import (e.g.
off-premises contract), modification (guarantee → consumer guarantee, commercial
guarantee), localization – substitution with a national term (code of conduct → code of
practice, natural person → individual, withdrawal → cancellation) and no transfer (Biel and Doczekalska 2020Biel, Łucja and Agnieszka Doczekalska 2020 “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.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(2):184–212.
). With modifications and localizations, two
variants denote the same concept at the national and
supranational level, which may lead to ‘incoherence’ between EU and national concept systems (Šarčević 2012 2012 “Coping with the Challenges of Legal Translation in Harmonization.” In The Role of Legal Translation in Legal Harmonization, edited by C. J. W. Baaij, 83–107. Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law International.
, 91). Furthermore, Pozzo (2020Pozzo, Barbara 2020 “Looking for a Consistent Terminology in European Contract Law.” Lingue Culture Mediazioni / Languages Cultures Mediation 7(1):103–126.
, 109) observes that consumer protection directives have been transposed in the
national laws of many member states, such as France, Spain or Italy, outside the Civil Code, giving “rise to a
series of separated conceptual systems not necessarily integrated together, or even in contrast one to the
other”, and hence adversely affecting the coherence of national terminology. The situation may be further
complicated if a given policy area is later regulated by the EU by regulations rather than directives since
such a regulation would use the terminology from the preceding directive, possibly resulting in inconsistent
terminology in the directly binding regulation and the directive-transposing instrument (Biel and Doczekalska 2020Biel, Łucja and Agnieszka Doczekalska 2020 “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.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(2):184–212.
, 207). Thus, supranational law is a rich breeding ground
for variation when it is applied in domestic legal systems, partly due to the nature of translation, its
underlying facilitator.
Translation
Variation is inevitable in translation due to its very nature as a decision process of
choosing out of a range of possible alternatives (Levý 1967 [2000]Levý, Jiří 1967 [2000] “Translation as a decision process.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lauwrence Venuti, 148–159. London: Routledge.,
148). The conceptual structure of languages, including legal languages, is asymmetrical. When searching for an
optimal way of approximating a source language (SL) concept, a translator chooses an equivalent depending on
such criteria as the similarity of the SL and target language (TL) concepts, Skopos (purpose) of translation,
recipients, genre, professional experience, approach to translation, etc. The translator may choose from a
number of techniques ranging on a cline from domestication to foreignization. When the incongruity between an
SL and TL concept is relatively small, a functional (natural) equivalent which designates the corresponding TL
concept is acceptable (Šarčević 1997Šarčević, Susan 1997 New Approach to Legal Translation. The Hague: Kluwer Law International.
, 236) and expected. Otherwise
the translator may for example use a hyponym or hyperonym, descriptive equivalent, literal equivalent or a
borrowing (transcription/naturalization) (Biel 2014 2014 Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
, 42–43). It is
difficult (if not impossible) to control the translator’s choices in ‘outstitutional’ translation, that is
outsourced translation outside institutions (Scott 2019Scott, Juliette R. 2019 Legal Translation Outsourced. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
), since
translators have an agency to decide which equivalent is best suited in this particular context and this
decision may be different from those taken by other translators, partly due to the fragmentation of
professional practice and confidential nature of legal documents. Such decisions may have varying degrees of
adequacy and adjustments to the client. It might be argued that the translators’ decisions are not totally
free as certain choices may be preferred or expected due to the market practice in the form of established or
recognized equivalents, also known as “the linguistic precedent” (Weston
2005Weston, Martin 2005 “Characteristics and constraints of producing bilingual judgments: the example of the European Court
of Human Rights.” In Jurilinguistics: between Law and Language, edited by Jean-Claude Gémar and Nicholas Nicholas Kasirer, 445–459. Brussels: Bruylant.
, 458). For example, the Polish public company spółka akcyjna is frequently
translated into English, including the national government’s materials for investors, as a joint stock
company, which is obsolete in the UK and refers to a different type of entity in the US (Biel 2006Biel, Łucja 2006 “Incongruity of Company Law Terms: Categorization of Polish Business Entities and their English
Equivalents.” Translation Journal 10(4), https://translationjournal.net/journal/38legal.htm). A translator working for a UK client might however opt
for a public company limited by shares, for a
US client – a publicly-held corporation or in the EU contexts – a public limited
liability company. Additionally, when translating into a pluricentric language, translators
sometimes mix variants from different legal systems, an error which is recurrent in trainee translations.
Considered as a whole, legal translations are bound to contain variants, particularly in outstitutional
contexts.
Variation may be expected to be more limited in institutional translation, such as EU
translation, since institutions have more resources and need to standardize terminology and control
translators’ choices. Yet, as has already been stated, variation cannot be completely eliminated. There is
ample evidence of variation in the institutional translation of multilingual legislation and case law,
uncovered by recent parallel corpus studies, which facilitate the search for variants (Bajčić and Dobrić Basaneže 2021Bajčić, Martina and Katja Dobrić Basaneže 2021 “Considering foreignization and domestication in EU legal translation: a corpus-based
study.” Perspectives 29(5):706–721. ; Biel
2014 2014 Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
; Biel and Koźbiał 2020Biel, Łucja and Dariusz Koźbiał 2020 “How do translators handle (near-) synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into
the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology.” Estudios de Traducción 10:69–90.
; Biel, Biernacka, and
Jopek-Bosiacka 2018; Guzmán and Prieto Ramos 2021Guzmán, Diego and Fernando Prieto Ramos 2021 “Assessing legal terminological variation in institutional translation: The case of national court
names in the human rights monitoring procedures of the United Nations.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 7(2):224–247.
; Prieto Ramos and Guzmán 2018Prieto Ramos, Fernando and Diego Guzmán 2018 “Legal Terminology Consistency and Adequacy as Quality Indicators in Institutional Translation: A
Mixed-Method Comparative Study.” In Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal
Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 81–101. London: Bloomsbury.
; Prieto Ramos and Morales Moreno 2019Prieto Ramos, Fernando and Albert Morales Moreno 2019 “Terminological innovation and harmonization at international organizations: Can too many cooks
spoil the broth?” In Legal Translation. Current Issues and Challenges in Research, Methods and Applications, edited by Ingrid Simonnæs and Marita Kristiansen, 87–110. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
; Prieto Ramos, this volume; Vigier and Sánchez Ramos 2017Vigier, Francisco Javier and María del Mar Sánchez Ramos 2017 “Using parallel corpora to study the translation of legal system-bound terms: The case of names of
English and Spanish courts.” In Computational and corpus-based phraseology, Second International Conference, Europhras 2017, London,
proceedings, edited by Ruslan Mitkov, 260–273. Cham: Springer.
). For example, Prieto Ramos and Guzmán’s (2018)Prieto Ramos, Fernando and Diego Guzmán 2018 “Legal Terminology Consistency and Adequacy as Quality Indicators in Institutional Translation: A
Mixed-Method Comparative Study.” In Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal
Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 81–101. London: Bloomsbury.
and Prieto Ramos and Morales
Moreno’s (2019)Prieto Ramos, Fernando and Albert Morales Moreno 2019 “Terminological innovation and harmonization at international organizations: Can too many cooks
spoil the broth?” In Legal Translation. Current Issues and Challenges in Research, Methods and Applications, edited by Ingrid Simonnæs and Marita Kristiansen, 87–110. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
comparative studies of terminological variation in translations in the EU, the
United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have confirmed a considerable intra- and
intertextual variation of Spanish equivalents in all institutions, with higher distribution and lower adequacy
levels in EU translations.
4.Attitudes towards variation
Attitudes towards variation and its acceptability depend on a type of variant, in particular the formal/conceptual distance and the distributional distance between the variants, genre, and consequences.
4.1Variation as a violation of the consistency and continuity principles in drafting and translation
If the variation of legal terms is addressed, it tends to pertain to linguistic and denominative variation rather than conceptual variation. It is mainly discussed in the context of legislative drafting and translation.
Consistency is regarded as one of the fundamental principles of good legal drafting, alongside
accuracy and clarity (Dannemann 2008Dannemann, Gerhard 2008 “Drafting Principles of Existing European Contract Law.” In Drafting Legislation: A Modern Approach, edited by Constantin Stefanou and Helen Xanthaki, 165–176. Aldershot: Ashgate., 175). In a general sense, it
pertains to “the logic of the act as a whole” and is also known as substantive consistency (EU 2015EU, European Union 2015 Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in
the drafting of European Union legislation. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
, 20). Terminological consistency, also known as formal consistency (EU 2015EU, European Union 2015 Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in
the drafting of European Union legislation. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
, 20), is its crucial component. Intratextual consistency is
frequently recommended in legislative drafting guides of international and national institutions. For example, the
Joint Practical Guide for persons involved in the drafting of European Union legislation
recommends expressing identical concepts in the same terms and
avoiding “the use of synonyms and different expressions to convey the same idea” (EU 2015EU, European Union 2015 Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in
the drafting of European Union legislation. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
, 11, 20). Similar advice may be found in the Australian Government’s drafting
guidelines (OPC 2016OPC, Office of Parliamentary Counsel 2016 Reducing complexity in legislation. Online: Australian Government.
) or the Polish Government’s drafting guidelines
(see § 10).1212.The Prime Minister’s Regulation of 20 June 2002 laying down the Principles of Legislative Drafting
(Dz.U. 2002 no. 100, item 908). Terminological consistency is also recommended in clear
writing and plain language guides, e.g. the Principles of Clear Writing in the US Drafting Resources for Federal
Agencies: “Be consistent. Don’t use different words to denote the same things”:
DON’T SAY: Each motor vehicle owner must register his or her car with the Automobile Division of the Metropolitan Police Department.
SAY: Each automobile owner must register his or her automobile with the Automobile Division of the Metropolitan Police Department. 1313. https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/write/legal-docs/clear-writing.html
This type of variation is sometimes referred to as “elegant variation” (OPC 2016OPC, Office of Parliamentary Counsel 2016 Reducing complexity in legislation. Online: Australian Government., 10) and is associated with the literary style as a device which makes writing
less monotonous. Elegant variation is strongly discouraged in legislative drafting: “You don’t need to use
synonyms to make your writing more interesting. Federal writers are not creating literature”.1414.
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/words/use-the-same-terms-consistently/
Legal language has a much higher tolerance for repetitions and lower lexical density
than general or literary language. Thus, consistency of terminology is a “virtue in legislative drafting” and a
prerequisite for effective communication (Crabbe 1993Crabbe, V. C. R. A. C. 1993 Legislative Drafting. London: Cavendish Publishing Limited.
, 55) and clarity
of expression (EU 2015EU, European Union 2015 Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in
the drafting of European Union legislation. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
, 11).
It is also a ‘golden’ rule of interpretation (Butt and Castle
2006Butt, Peter and Richard Castle 2006 Modern Legal Drafting: A Guide to Using Clearer Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 61) based on the “presumption against a change of terminological usage” (Crabbe 1993Crabbe, V. C. R. A. C. 1993 Legislative Drafting. London: Cavendish Publishing Limited.
, citing Lord Simon in Black-Clawson International Ltd. v Papierwerke
Waldof-Aschaffenburg A.-G. [1975]). Inconsistent terms may lead to “complex issues of interpretation” (OPC 2016OPC, Office of Parliamentary Counsel 2016 Reducing complexity in legislation. Online: Australian Government.
, 10) and often confuse addressees who would tend to attribute
distinct meaning to two different terms even though they refer to the same concept: “Different words are taken to
refer to different things, and same words to same things” (Butt and Castle
2006Butt, Peter and Richard Castle 2006 Modern Legal Drafting: A Guide to Using Clearer Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
, 62). While the attitudes to elegant variation in legislative drafting are clearly negative, some
authors admit the possibility of terminological variation “in different parts of the document where a different
tone is called for” as “[t]o insist on precisely the same terminology and a uniform tone may make the document
mind-numbingly boring” (Butt and Castle 2006Butt, Peter and Richard Castle 2006 Modern Legal Drafting: A Guide to Using Clearer Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
, 203). As previously
observed, elegant variation is more tolerated in other legal genres, e.g. judgments or enabling (pedagogical)
genres.
Due to the systemic nature of law, drafters are also expected to maintain intertextual consistency,
also known as continuity (Stefaniak 2017Stefaniak, Karolina 2017 “Terminology work in the European Commission. Ensuring high-quality translation in a multilingual
environment.” In Quality aspects in institutional translation, edited by Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel and Krzysztof Łoboda, 109–121. Berlin: Language Science Press., 116), that is terminological
consistency with the earlier body of legal texts, in particular preceding and amended instruments, related acts
(e.g. implementing acts) and other instruments in the same field (EU
2015EU, European Union 2015 Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in
the drafting of European Union legislation. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
, 20), as well as higher-ranking acts. The use of continued terms and elimination of synonyms
ensures “legal security and clarity”:
Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/2201 provides for a definition of the term ‘juveniles of Northern Prawn’ in order to determine the size of fish whose number in the overall catch can trigger real-time closures of fisheries. For the sake of legal security and clarity, that Regulation should use throughout the same term for the same concept. Therefore, ‘juveniles of Northern Prawn’ should be used throughout the act, instead of any synonym thereof, such as ‘Pandalus below trigger length’ or ‘undersized Pandalus’.1515.Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2021/1473 of 30 June 2021 correcting Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/2201 as regards certain rules for the implementation of real-time closures for Northern prawn fisheries in the Skagerrak OJ L 325, 15.9.2021, p. 1–5. (emphasis added)
Both intra- and intertextual variation is “always a problem” and “works to the detriment of
clarity” in multilingual law, which relies on translation (Strandvik
2012Strandvik, Ingemar 2012 “Legal Harmonization Through Legal Translation: Texts that Say the Same Thing?” In The Role of Legal Translation in Legal Harmonization, edited by C. J. W. Baaij, 25–49. Alphen aan den Rijn: Wolters Kluwer., 39). Inconsistencies in the source text can trigger additional variation in translation and lead
to a lack of multilingual concordance between authentic language versions of a legal act, which would negatively
affect the uniform application and interpretation of multilingual law (Bajčić
and Dobrić Basaneže 2021Bajčić, Martina and Katja Dobrić Basaneže 2021 “Considering foreignization and domestication in EU legal translation: a corpus-based
study.” Perspectives 29(5):706–721.
, 718).
Terminological consistency has an additional dimension in translation as it concerns the
relationship between SL and TL concepts. Once a TL equivalent is introduced for an SL term, the same TL equivalent
should in principle be used when this SL term appears unless the context requires otherwise. The requirement to
ensure terminological consistency is regarded as one of industry quality criteria, stipulated with reference to
translation in the general translation services standard ISO 17100 2015ISO 17100 2015 Translation services – Requirements for translation services. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
and the legal translation standard ISO 20771 2020ISO 20771 2020 Legal translation – Requirements. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
, as well as with
reference to post-editing and pre-editing in the post-editing standard ISO
18587 2017ISO 18587 2017 Translation services – Post-editing of machine translation output – Requirements. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
. In general, the lack of terminological consistency in translation “can hinder
communication, create confusion, damage a company’s image or even result in legal issues” (Bowker 2015Bowker, Lynne 2015 “Terminology and translation.” In Handbook of Terminology, edited by Hendrik J. Kockaert and Frieda Steurs, 304–323. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
, 306).
Terminological consistency and continuity are often foregrounded in institutional (legal)
translation as one of the key quality requirements and metrics alongside accuracy and clarity (Biel 2017 2017 “Quality in institutional EU translation. Parameters, policies and practices.” In Quality aspects in institutional translation, edited by Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel and Krzysztof Łoboda, 31–57. Berlin: Language Science Press., 34). Legal translations – or language versions of a
multilingual legal act – should be “coherent, systematic, consistent” (Robertson 2015Robertson, Colin 2015 “EU Multilingual Law: Interfaces of Law, Language and Culture.” In Language and Culture in EU Law. Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Susan Šarčević, 33–52. Farnham: Ashgate.
, 40). Institutional style guides, translation tender specifications and quality guides
stress both intratextual and intertextual consistency. For example, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Translation (DGT) Translation Quality
Guidelines lay down the following requirement for legal documents:
Terminology must be internally and externally consistent, i.e. it must be used coherently within the act itself (without synonyms or reformulations) and in line with any basic act(s) and any parallel acts.(DGT 2015DGT, Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission 2015 DGT Translation Quality Guidelines. https://ec.europa.eu/translation/maltese/guidelines/documents/dgt_translation_quality_guidelines_en.pdf, 5)
A failure to comply with terminological consistency, that is an inconsistent term, is singled out
as a type of error in the evaluation grid applied by DGT to assess external translations (Strandvik 2017 2017 “Evaluation of outsourced translations. State of play in the European Commission’s
Directorate-General for Translation (DGT).” In Quality aspects in institutional translation, edited by Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel and Krzysztof Łoboda, 123–137. Berlin: Language Science Press., 126). If an act has already been adopted, intra- and intertextual
variants may be eliminated by way of corrigenda, especially if they are confusing (Biel and Pytel 2021Biel, Łucja and Izabela Pytel 2021 “Corrigenda of EU Legislative Acts as an Indicator of Quality Assurance Failures: A Micro-Diachronic
Analysis of Errors Rectified in the Polish Corrigenda.” In Institutional Translation and Interpreting: Assessing Practices and Managing for Quality, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 150–173. New York: Routledge.
with reference to EU legal acts), which is time-consuming and
involves extra costs for institutions (EC 2012EC, European Commission 2012 Quantifying Quality Costs and the Cost of Poor Quality in Translation. Quality Efforts and the
Consequences of Poor Quality in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
, 24). Furthermore, the
lack of terminological consistency may lead to linguistic divergences between the language versions of a legal act
which have to be settled by the court: for example, if some versions use one term throughout while other versions
use two terms to denote the same concept (Pacho Aljanati 2015Pacho Aljanati, Lucía 2015 The Court of Justice of the European Union’s case law on linguistic divergences (2007–2013):
interpretation criteria and implications for the translation of EU legislation. Ph.D. thesis, Departament de Dret Públic i de Ciències Historicojurídiques, Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona.,
136).
Measures put in place by institutions to standardize and ensure a consistent use of terminology in
translation include term bases which, among others, can contribute to the canonization of one of the acceptable
variant forms and the elimination of others (Chiocchetti et al. 2017Chiocchetti, Elena, Tanja Wissik, Vesna Lušicky, and Michael Wetzel 2017 “Quality assurance in multilingual legal databases.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 27:164–188.,
175), databases of legal texts and CAT tools, which facilitate work with multilingual legal texts, marked by a
considerable degree of “recycling” and “repetition and interconnection among texts” (Hanzl and Beaven 2017Hanzl, Jan and John Beaven 2017 “Quality assurance at the Council of the EU’s Translation Service.” In Quality aspects in institutional translation, edited by Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel and Krzysztof Łoboda, 139–153. Berlin: Language Science Press.
, 141–145).
4.2Conceptual variation as a drafting technique
As observed by Tiersma in the US context, lawyers have “a very schizophrenic attitude toward
synonyms” as on the one hand they observe the “same meaning, same form” principle and on the other hand “the
obsessive use of word lists by many lawyers seems to indicate a great love for synonyms, or at least, near
synonyms” (1999Tiersma, Peter M. 1999 Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press., 113). In fact, attitudes to the phrase-level
variation – synonym-strings (see Section 2.3.1.1) – vary. While it is acknowledged that they might be useful in
some contexts, modern drafting and plain language guides recommend eliminating redundancy wherever possible (Adams 2013Adams, Kenneth A. 2013 A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Bar Association.
, 70; Barton and Smith
2019Barton, Jill and Rachel H. Smith 2019 The Handbook for the New Legal Writer. 2nd ed. New York: Wolters Kluwer.
, 151). Synonym-strings which consist of denominative variants, that is which evoke a single
concept, e.g. null and void, cease and desist, are historical remnants considered now to be a
“stylistic quirk”, “mannerism” and “redundancy” (Garner 2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
, 293–294).
They are still routinely used but discouraged in clear/plain language guides, for example, the US government’s
plain language website1616.
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/concise/
recommends avoiding doublets and triplets, e.g.
cease and desist → stop; due and payable → due. This is specifically recommended when a string contains a special type of conceptual
variants – a hypernym which subsumes the other variants, e.g. costs and expenses – since costs
are a subtype of expenses (Adams 2013Adams, Kenneth A. 2013 A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Bar Association.
, 606).
Yet it is acknowledged that synonym-strings composed of conceptual variants, which attempt to
exhaustively cover a certain concept field with partial synonyms may be “very useful” (Mattila 2006Mattila, H. E. S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Hampshire: Ashgate., 112) and “sometimes necessary” (Adams
2013Adams, Kenneth A. 2013 A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Bar Association.
, 73), particularly in common law countries, because they enable lawyers to draft contracts to
cover “the universe of possibilities” (Adams 2013Adams, Kenneth A. 2013 A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Bar Association.
, 73) and all
eventualities “without leaving gaps” by “blanket coverage of the semantic field intended” (Mattila 2006Mattila, H. E. S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Hampshire: Ashgate.
, 112). However, they are used to the point that they are “over-cautious”
(Mattila 2006Mattila, H. E. S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Hampshire: Ashgate.
, 234) and although synonym-strings lend “elegance”
and “sophistication” to the writer’s style they may be perceived as “awkward and ostentatious” (Barton and Smith 2019Barton, Jill and Rachel H. Smith 2019 The Handbook for the New Legal Writer. 2nd ed. New York: Wolters Kluwer.
, 151). Synonym-strings may be confusing and raise
interpretative doubts as to whether their constituents are full synonyms, and, hence, they may entail risks:
“doublets may be given unforeseen meanings by clever interpreters”, especially in the case of less frequent
expressions (Garner 2001Garner, Bryan A. 2001 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
, 294). Likewise, a court may assign
“unanticipated meaning to an element in a string” (Adams 2013Adams, Kenneth A. 2013 A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Bar Association.
, 71–72)
as “courts routinely invoke the principle that in interpreting legal documents, every word is to be given meaning
and nothing is to be treated as superfluous” (Adams 2013Adams, Kenneth A. 2013 A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Bar Association.
, 71).
This interpretative principle is used more actively in civil law systems, the legal languages of
which are far less tolerant of redundant synonymy. This poses some challenges to translators who are confronted
with synonym-strings in English source texts. Translators are usually recommended to simplify them by eliminating
redundant elements and using the most general synonym. This technique is referred to by Mayoral Asensio as
“aggregate translation” by “using as few words as possible in a way that collects all the different meanings of
the original in a global way” as it will improve readability and clarity although as he notes, it may “suppress
the explicitness intended in the original, when the author expressly wishes to state some individual case”; this
reduction may “seem suspicious to many recipients” and hence should be applied “with the utmost discretion” in
official translations (2003Mayoral Asensio, Roberto 2003 Translating Official Documents. Manchester: St Jerome., 58). Some textbooks are more cautious,
e.g. Alcaraz Varó and Hughes (2002Alcaraz Varó, Enrique and Brian Hughes 2002 Legal Translation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.
, 10) admit both options – literal
translation with redundancy and reduction.
Finally, the use of conceptual variants may be a studied choice in multilingual law and in
transposing legal instruments to make a distinction between autonomous supranational concepts and domestic legal
concepts. For example, EU drafters are recommended to avoid terms of national law (EU 2015EU, European Union 2015 Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in
the drafting of European Union legislation. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union., 18) and use neologisms and generic terms in a specialized sense (Mattila 2006Mattila, H. E. S. 2006 Comparative Legal Linguistics. Hampshire: Ashgate.
, 118–119), that is to create conceptual variants.
5.Causes of legal terminology variation
This Section discusses the causes of legal variation, drawing on Freixa’s (2006)Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77. typology and adjusting it to legal settings. Freixa
(2006)Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77.
explains variation through preliminary, dialectal, functional, discursive, interlinguistic and
cognitive causes. Preliminary causes pertain to language in general and are related to linguistic redundancy
(co-existing with economy) and the arbitrariness of linguistic signs (Freixa
2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77.
, 53–54). Causes which are most relevant in the legal context are: dialectal, functional, discursive
and cognitive ones.
Applicable dialectal causes include chronological variation and geographical variation. Chronological variation – discussed as diachronic variation in Section 2.2 – is mainly caused by the change and modernization of legal discourse, e.g., plain language movements, as well as developments triggered by new knowledge, legal solutions and harmonization of law. Geographical variation corresponds to intersystemic variation and concerns variants developed and distributed in different legal systems (see Section 3.2).
Functional causes are related to vertical variation; they involve adaptations to the level of language
(channel, topic, communicative purpose, and register) and to the level of specialization, i.e., to recipients and
their knowledge (Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77. , 56–60). In the legal domain it mainly
includes variation across legal genres (prescriptive versus descriptive variants), legal and non-legal genres,
including semi-legal, general-language and colloquial variants connected with popularization and adjustments to
non-experts (see Section 3.1).
Interlinguistic causes, which in Freixa’s typology cover a cohabitation of the “local” term and the loanword due to language contacts, may be connected with legal transplants transferred from other legal systems to innovate or may be associated with translation.
Discursive causes are triggered by the avoidance of repetition, linguistic economy as well as creativity
and emphasis (Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77. , 60–62). They were discussed under elegant
variation (see Section 4.1). They may be expected to be controlled in
legislation but more frequent in secondary genres (judgments) as a cohesive device, and in enabling genres as
explanatory tools. Discursive causes often trigger linguistic variants (Daille
2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
, 35), in particular if a term violates the principle of conciseness (ISO 704 2009ISO 704 2009 Terminology work – Principles and methods. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
, 38; Sager 1990Sager, Juan C. 1990 A Practical Course in Terminology Processing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
, 57), i.e. is too
long or linguistically complex, creating a need to invent abbreviated forms, e.g. core principles of effective
banking supervision → Basel core principles or BCP (IATE ID 913508), which are easier to
recall and use.
Cognitive causes account for different viewpoints behind variants and are related to conceptual
imprecision, ideological detachment and differences in conceptualization (Freixa
2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77. , 64). Cognitive causes often trigger conceptual variants (Daille
2017 2017 Term Variation in Specialised Corpora: Characterisation, automatic discovery and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
, 35) and may co-exist with other causes, such as functional, dialectal or discursive ones (Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77.
, 67). In the dynamic approach to variation, concepts are
multidimensional and can be seen from a number of perspectives (Rogers 2004Rogers, Margaret 2004 “Multidimensionality in concepts systems: A bilingual textual perspective.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 10(2):215–240.
; Temmerman 2000Temmerman, Rita 2000 Towards New Ways of Terminology Description: The sociocognitive approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
),
depending on which aspect of a concept needs to be foregrounded. Different conceptualizations can be triggered if a
term violates the principle of transparency, one of the basic term formation principles (ISO 704 2009ISO 704 2009 Terminology work – Principles and methods. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
, 39; Sager 1990Sager, Juan C. 1990 A Practical Course in Terminology Processing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
, 57). If a
prescriptive (legislative) term is opaque, it may prompt users to come up with variants which are more transparent and
comprehensible and, hence, which provide easier and more precise prompts to evoke the concept. The previously
discussed non-legislative Polish variant umowa kupna-sprzedaży [purchase-sales contract] incorporates
the point of view of both the buyer and the seller in contrast to the legislative variant umowa
sprzedaży [sales contract], which accounts only for the seller and hence, as can be deduced from the
popularity of the former, is felt by the users as inadequate. Differences in conceptualization may be combined with
ideologically-loaded and emotionally-charged choices and variants may have different – negative, positive or neutral –
semantic prosodies. Such shifts in evaluation were documented in Mariani’s
(2021)Mariani, Jessica 2021 “Migration terminology in the EU Institutions: Overview and patterns of use of terms from 1950 to
2016.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 27(1):35–55.
study of the evolution of EU terms denoting migrants over decades, identifying over 50 terms
developed to denote different motives, conditions of entry and legal status, but also semantic prosodies, e.g.
third-country national, alien, controversial illegal migrant replaced by
irregular migrant, forced migrant, displaced person, overstayer, asylum seeker versus
applicant for international protection, etc. The choice of a variant “plays a vital role in
making an impact in the representation of migrants and refugees in political institutions and society” (Mariani 2021Mariani, Jessica 2021 “Migration terminology in the EU Institutions: Overview and patterns of use of terms from 1950 to
2016.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 27(1):35–55.
, 35). It is also ideologically important which variants are
chosen in legislation as they become prioritized and sanctioned as authoritative, thus shaping conceptualizations in
other discourses. Another cause of cognitively motivated variation is conceptual imprecision (fuzzy boundaries of
concepts, low degree of concept fixation) and the lack of conceptual stability (Freixa 2006Freixa, Judit 2006 “Causes of denominative variation in terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 12(1):51–77.
, 64). For example, Hourani-Martín and Tabares-Plasencia (2020Hourani-Martín, Dunia and Encarnación Tabares-Plasencia 2020 “Morphosyntactic and semantic behaviour of legal phraseological units: A case study in Spanish
verb-noun constructions about money laundering.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(1):108–131.
, 113–114) report considerable terminological variation in Spanish equivalents of the term
money laundering, e.g. blanqueo de capitales [capital bleaching],
legitimación de capital [capital legalization], lavado de activos [asset
laundering], which they explain with controversies in legal literature as to whether the concealed money has to be
illicit or not.
Although Freixa does not list it as a cause of variation, unmotivated variation should also be acknowledged. It is typically attributed to an error and may be due to a lack of care or even sloppiness, insufficient knowledge, insufficient quality control and inadequate resources, both as regards drafting and translation. For example, terminological resources do not always account for variants and if they do, the nature of variation is rarely explained. The inconsistent use of terminology is a frequent problem in machine translation and post-editing (cf. Stefaniak and Killman in this volume), which are being used increasingly more at international institutions. Although there are applications which facilitate automatic checks of consistency, especially in translation, such variants may not be easy to spot, especially in monolingual contexts and when working with inflectional languages.
Variation may be facilitated by the sheer length of texts: “despite the principle that drafters should be
rigorously consistent in their use of terminology, in a lengthy document the drafter may well slip” (Butt and Castle 2006Butt, Peter and Richard Castle 2006 Modern Legal Drafting: A Guide to Using Clearer Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 203). Length can have a “multiplier effect” in
translation as long texts are often split between several translators (Guzmán and
Prieto Ramos 2021Guzmán, Diego and Fernando Prieto Ramos 2021 “Assessing legal terminological variation in institutional translation: The case of national court
names in the human rights monitoring procedures of the United Nations.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 7(2):224–247.
, 21). Another factor is the complexity of drafting, in particular the collective
authorship, involving a large number of drafters: “inconsistencies of language can arise when large numbers of
drafting teams are working on the same Act” (OPC 2016OPC, Office of Parliamentary Counsel 2016 Reducing complexity in legislation. Online: Australian Government.
, 10), translators and
other experts. For example, under an ordinary legislative procedure an EU legal act passes through three
institutions – the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament – where it is consulted, modified and
translated by different sets of experts, which results in a “patched” text (Biel
and Pytel 2021Biel, Łucja and Izabela Pytel 2021 “Corrigenda of EU Legislative Acts as an Indicator of Quality Assurance Failures: A Micro-Diachronic
Analysis of Errors Rectified in the Polish Corrigenda.” In Institutional Translation and Interpreting: Assessing Practices and Managing for Quality, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 150–173. New York: Routledge.
, 156) and ample opportunities for inadvertent variation. The fragmentation of texts and
translation teams has been listed by Prieto Ramos and Guzmán (2018Prieto Ramos, Fernando and Diego Guzmán 2018 “Legal Terminology Consistency and Adequacy as Quality Indicators in Institutional Translation: A
Mixed-Method Comparative Study.” In Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal
Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 81–101. London: Bloomsbury.
, 97) as
one of the variation facilitators in institutional translation.
Some additional causes may trigger variation in translation. Besides the very nature of translation as a
constrained choice out of a number of options, one cannot not notice that some concepts trigger a small range while
others a broader range of variants. The discussion focuses on the causes identified by Biel and Koźbiał (2020)Biel, Łucja and Dariusz Koźbiał 2020 “How do translators handle (near-) synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into
the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology.” Estudios de Traducción 10:69–90. .
The first group of causes is associated with the properties of SL concepts:
-
conceptual imprecision,
-
opacity,
-
metaphorization,
-
polysemy,
-
low termness.
Metaphorized terms can be illustrated with whistleblower, which has more than one
equivalent in most EU official languages in its IATE entry (ID 2201493), with as many as five variants in Finish and
Italian (see Chart 3) and four in Danish, Polish and Greek, with few
languages marking one of the variants as “preferred”. This degree of variation may be caused by the fact that a
metaphor necessitates a choice between the metaphorical rendering and demetaphorization, e.g., a metaphor is unknown
in the TL or the TL is less tolerant of metaphorical terms. For example, capital injection is both
translated in Polish language versions of EU law literally as zastrzyk kapitału [capital injection]
(IATE ID 1177045) and through demetaphorized explicitation dokapitalizowanie
[additional-capitalization], among others. See also Bromwich and Manzella
(2018)Bromwich, William and Pietro Manzella 2018 “Shock absorbers, tax wedges and white resignations: language challenges in comparative industrial
relations.” The Translator 24(1):70–88. on the difficulties connected with translating metaphorical terms of industrial relations and Prieto Ramos and Guzmán’s (2018)Prieto Ramos, Fernando and Diego Guzmán 2018 “Legal Terminology Consistency and Adequacy as Quality Indicators in Institutional Translation: A
Mixed-Method Comparative Study.” In Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal
Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 81–101. London: Bloomsbury.
study of variants of metaphorical terms,
e.g. hedge fund, tariff peak, tariff escalation, in
institutional translation (even though the authors do not attribute variation to metaphorization per se).
Termness (or terminologicality), a concept introduced by Shelov (Picht and Draskau 1985Picht, Heribert and Jennifer Draskau 1985 Terminology: an Introduction. Guildford: University of Surrey., 97–98), concerns the form side of a term and to what extent users (in this case
translators) recognize that they are dealing with a term. If a term has low termness, it is less likely to be
recognized as a term and rendered rigorously (failure to terminologize) (Biel
2014 2014 Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
, 43). This may happen if a term is not defined, has low frequency and/or is formed with everyday words
with a specialized meaning, a frequent technique alongside purely technical terms in legal language (Alcaraz Varó and Hughes 2002Alcaraz Varó, Enrique and Brian Hughes 2002 Legal Translation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.
, 16), particularly in EU law. The chart below
shows an English term small-scale fisheries which has four variants in IATE highlighting different
aspects of the concept, e.g. artisanal fishing and non-industrial fishing. It
triggers even more variants in Polish (see Chart 4), partly as the direct
literal equivalent rybołóstwo małoskalowe [small-scale fisheries] sounds unnatural. There are
alternative forms explicating various aspects of the concept: rybołóstwo łodziowe [boat fisheries],
rybołóstwo przybrzeżne [close-to-the-shore fisheries], rybołóstwo tradycyjne
[traditional fisheries] and rybołóstwo rzemieślnicze [artisanal fisheries] (IATE ID 784480), with a
number of additional variants combining the above options, e.g. tradycyjne łodziowe rybołówstwo
przybrzeżne [traditional close-to-the-shore boat fisheries] in EUR-Lex. On the one hand, variation could
have been prompted by the premodifier small-scale which may be perceived as an attribute rather than
a defining feature; on the other hand, by creative attempts to make the Polish equivalent more transparent and hence
comprehensible.
The next group of causes concerns the degree of asymmetry between an SL concept and a TL concept or even
between clusters of SL and TL variants, that is also the structure and
complexity of corresponding concept fields in the SL and TL (Biel and Koźbiał
2020Biel, Łucja and Dariusz Koźbiał 2020 “How do translators handle (near-) synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into
the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology.” Estudios de Traducción 10:69–90. , 81–82).
Variation may be facilitated by the number of variants, overlaps of their senses and level of
specificity (Biel and Koźbiał 2020Biel, Łucja and Dariusz Koźbiał 2020 “How do translators handle (near-) synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into
the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology.” Estudios de Traducción 10:69–90. , 82). Partial and zero equivalence
requires translators to search for an optimal way of approximating the concept, especially when a literal equivalent
is not transparent, aesthetically pleasing (natural) or is a false friend. For example, the Polish term
prokurent, which means a court-registered authorized signatory for a company, a concept which
does not exist in English company law, is frequently approximated by Polish translators as a proxy
(which is misleading as it evokes a different concept of a person appointed to vote at a general meeting), with other
variants being procurist, procurator, holder of a commercial power of attorney, commercial attorney,
commercial representative, etc., as can be found in articles of association of top Polish listed
companies. Similar observations as to the degree of incongruity and asymmetry as a cause of variation can be found,
for example, in Sosoni and O’Shea’s study of Greek and English property law terminology (2021Sosoni, Vilelmini and John O’Shea 2021 “Translating property law terms: an investigation of Greek notarial deeds and their English
translations.” Perspectives 29(2):184–198.
) and Guzmán and Prieto Ramos’s (2021Guzmán, Diego and Fernando Prieto Ramos 2021 “Assessing legal terminological variation in institutional translation: The case of national court
names in the human rights monitoring procedures of the United Nations.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 7(2):224–247.
, 244)
study of national court names in the UN documents, who argue that it is “the most determining factor in translation
variability” rather than source term frequency or SL.
Yet the latter study concerns only English-Spanish and French-Spanish translations, that is relatively closely related languages, and it cannot be excluded that the distance between SL and TL may increase variation as it is likely that it also affects the conceptual layer of the languages. Increased linguistic variation can be found in translations from languages which prefer synthetic structures (e.g. English) into languages which prefer analytical structures (e.g. Polish, an inflectional language) and hence require some grammatical explicitation of internal relations within a multi-word term. For example, collusive behaviour (IATE ID 119963), which does not have a Polish equivalent in IATE, has a few explicating variants in EU law and case law, e.g. zachowania mające znamiona zmowy [behaviours having properties of collusion], zachowania noszące znamiona zmowy [behaviours carrying properties of collusion] and zachowania w zmowie [behaviours in collusion].
Finally, variation in translation may be caused by variation in source texts. Strandvik argues that
source text inconsistencies are likely to be reflected in target texts (2012Strandvik, Ingemar 2012 “Legal Harmonization Through Legal Translation: Texts that Say the Same Thing?” In The Role of Legal Translation in Legal Harmonization, edited by C. J. W. Baaij, 25–49. Alphen aan den Rijn: Wolters Kluwer., 39–40). Biel and Koźbiał’s study into how translators handle variants in EU competition law and case
law shows that their behaviour is unpredictable and idiosyncratic: variation can be reflected symmetrically or
asymmetrically in translations. It can be eliminated, partly reduced, mirrored or increased in translation. On the one
hand, translators tend to normalize variation; on the other hand, they also introduce additional variation and
cross-variation, when SL variants interchangeably trigger a few synonymous equivalents (2020Biel, Łucja and Agnieszka Doczekalska 2020 “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.” Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 26(2):184–212.
).
6.Concluding remarks
This chapter has demonstrated that the variation of legal terminology does exist and is a multi-faceted and complex phenomenon. It has presented various types of variants and their distribution, taking into account the variable of a legal system. Although attitudes towards variation are predominantly negative, finer distinctions should be made to account for a type of variant as conceptual variants seem to evoke more positive attitudes and are sometimes regarded as useful. Finally, the chapter discussed the causes and motivations of variation, ranging from human error through functional, discursive, dialectic to cognitive causes, as well as additional causes in translation, such as the formal and conceptual properties of SL terms and their degree of incongruity to TL terms. Areas which are promising and require further empirical work are cognitive causes of variation and factors which trigger variation in translation. This would contribute to our better understanding of variation in the legal context.