Abstract
Corpus-based Translation Studies has opened new avenues to research since Mona Baker published her seminal study back in the 1990s. In comparison to other domains within Translation Studies, in legal translation corpus-based research has not been so widely used despite its incontestable potential and usefulness. In this field, parallel corpora are chiefly used to study the translation process and to identify translation options for problematic terminological and phraseological units. Hence, parallel corpora allow researchers to systematically and objectively study the solutions given to pre-identified translation problems, like legal system-bound terms, which are the quintessential feature of legal translation as clear exponents of legal asymmetry and conceptual-terminological incongruity.
In this contribution, we describe the design, compilation and alignment of a specialised bilingual parallel corpus (English-Spanish) comprising judgments delivered by the European Union Court of Justice. With the main aim of studying the options found for the translation of court names, one corpus is made up of 127 aligned judgments in English and Spanish that refer to English courts, whereas the other corpus consists of 145 aligned files that refer to Spanish courts. The corpus was aligned at sentence level, accounting for 16,012 aligned sentence pairs for the English corpus, and 13,971 for the Spanish corpus. In the following we present the most relevant outcomes of this study (both from a qualitative and quantitative perspective), describe technical aspects related to the compilation process and point to further uses of these corpora, specifically for training purposes.
Keywords
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- 1.
- 2.
For more on the English court system see https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/courts-structure-0715.pdf (last accessed: 22 May 2017).
- 3.
For more on the Spanish court system see http://www.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/Portal/es/administracion-justicia/organizacion-justicia/organizacion-juzgados/juzgados-tribunales (last accessed: 22 May 2017).
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Regional High Court may be especially risky, as, if back-translated into Spanish, could lead to Tribunal Superior de Justicia [High Court of Justice], which is a region-level court and not a province-level court like Audiencia Provincial.
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Vigier, F.J., del Mar Sánchez, M. (2017). Using Parallel Corpora to Study the Translation of Legal System-Bound Terms: The Case of Names of English and Spanish Courts. In: Mitkov, R. (eds) Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology. EUROPHRAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10596. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_19
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