Linguistic variants

Linguistic variants (Daille 2017Daille, Béatrice 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)Daille, Béatrice 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.

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 2017Daille, Béatrice 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 2017Daille, Béatrice 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 2009Garner, Bryan A. 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 2017Daille, Béatrice 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).

3.1.1Intratextual intrasystemic variants

Variants at the phrase level

Synonym-strings

Phrase-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 2022Biel, Łucja 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 2014Biel, Łucja 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.).

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 2012Šarčević, Susan 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 2014Biel, Łucja 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 2014Biel, Łucja 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.