Volume 6, Issue 1

The European Union is a legal community of hundreds of millions of people, established in a single market through European law. This is tied to language and translation into 24 official languages, each with equally authentic status. However, this leads to considerable legal differences between Member States and underscores the dominance of English, at the Court of Justice that of French (monolingualism), both of which have no legal foundation. Rule-of-law order (Rechtsstaatlichkeit) is created by the European Reference Language System (Europäisches Referenzsprachensystem), which is presented here as a tool for the urgently required reform of the language laws in the European Union: Not having a hegemonial focus on a single language (and thus on a single legal world) or on the exclusivity of some few languages, it offers a legal-linguistic basis of communication with all treaty languages of the European Union for a clear European law and prosperity. The official languages of the Member States thus preserve the mother tongue reality of the citizens in the sense of the subsidiarity principle (multilingualism). In this way, the citizens and their Union acquire a legally valid voice and identity. This seems necessary in the face of the present restructuring of the world, in order to maintain peace for the people in Europe and to continue promoting their well-being. The basis is legal linguistics (Rechtslinguistik).

Good governance is a key factor in underpinning the integrity and efficiency of an institution, whether it is a private company or a national or international organisation. The core principles of good governance are now often defined as fairness , accountability , responsibility and transparency . Although these terms are familiar to all those involved in corporate social responsibility/sustainability and business ethics, and are frequently discussed in the European Parliament and European directives, they often pose a challenge to the translator, since obvious equivalents for all of them do not exist in all EU languages. In this paper, I take the example of accountability , and examine the way that it is represented in both Spanish and German in the EUROPARL7 parallel corpus of European Parliament Proceedings, available in the Sketch Engine corpus platform. Accountability in English can be defined as an assurance that individuals or organizations will be evaluated on their performance or behaviour related to something for which they are responsible, or more simply, as being responsible for explaining what you do and able to give a satisfactory account of it to those whom your actions affect. The English term accountability thus differs from responsibility and transparency , although it overlaps with both. However, not all languages allow us to distinguish easily between the concepts they designate. In fact, the majority of Spanish translations of accountability found in EUROPARL7 simply use responsabilidad , while others make reference to rendir cuentas or rendición de cuentas , and a few actually use transparencia . In German, the picture is less confused, with the closer term Rechenschaftspflicht employed as the usual translation, but an abundance of alternatives such as Verantwortlichkeit and Auskunftspflicht also appear. In my conclusions, I discuss the rationale that may underlie the different choices, point to problems that might arise from poor translations, and suggest reasons we should strive to maintain clear definitions of these key concepts.

Setting out from a quotation by Eugene Nida, this paper critically analyses the issue of translation quality in the peculiar context of EU institutions and bodies. While EU-specific translating is certainly acknowledged as a purposeful activity and generally takes into account the various parameters associated with functionalist theories of translation, other factors may intervene. In particular, attention is drawn to the risk that a single word or concept can take on different meanings in each of the institutional or cultural contexts comprising the European Union, and to the need to make sure that Europe’s words mean the same thing for any European citizen. Against this backdrop, the creation of EU-specific terminology is seen as an inherent step in the formation of new institutional or political concepts related to the activities or the practices of the European Union. Some examples of translation discrepancies are presented, along with their differing impact on the effectiveness of the legal or political message and the differing quality standards they seem to require in order to ensure interlingual consistency.

This paper presents a Corpus Linguistics study of lexical features in the Opinions of Advocates General (AGs) of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Using an interdisciplinary approach, combining legal studies, corpus linguistics and translation studies theories, the study aims to compare the language of some AGs’ Opinions, before and after the introduction of changes in the CJEU’s linguistic regime relating to the language(s) in which Opinions are normally drafted. The results of the corpus linguistic analysis demonstrate that certain changes in the linguistic and stylistic nature of AGs’ Opinions can be observed post-2004. On the one hand, those changes corroborate the study’s primary hypothesis that AG Opinions drafted after 2004 in non-mother tongue languages are stylistically simpler and less ‘fluent’ than those drafted (in AGs’ mother tongues) before 2004. On the other hand, the results also indicate that AG Opinions drafted after 2004 in mother tongue languages are similarly becoming stylistically simpler. These results are inherently interesting in terms of Corpus Linguistics research. However, in order to have a value outside of that field, they are best considered as a basis for more nuanced research questions, which can be investigated through interdisciplinary methods taking account of the factors of production of AG Opinions.

Legal concepts are generally deeply rooted in a specific legal system. Even when two legal systems use the same official language, such as Germany and Austria, the system-boundness of their legal concepts may lead to communication problems. German is also an officially recognised minority language in South Tyrol, Italy. In South Tyrol, the local public authorities must use the minority language in their relations with German-speaking citizens. This brought about the need to elaborate a local German legal terminology to express Italian legal concepts. Terminology development efforts intended to promote terminology consistency and avoid an excessive regionalisation of South Tyrolean German, so as to foster communication with the neighbouring German-speaking legal systems. In the last decades, European Union law has led to a growing harmonisation in the legal terminologies of its Member States, facilitating communication between the different legal systems, also with benefits for terminology work in South Tyrol. This paper focuses on how European legal acts impact on national legal terminology and affect German legal terminology in South Tyrol. The considerations set out are based on comparative legal terminology work regarding the Italian and the German-speaking legal systems done at Eurac Research.