Volume 15, Issue 1

Legal phraseology is an essential component of legal language, and thus of legal communication, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. It is also one of the main problems in legal translation since legal phraseological units are determined by law-specific factors, and as such are usually unknown to legal translators, who in most cases are not lawyers. As there are still no aids to support the translation of legal phraseology, legal translators struggle with legal phraseology. This is problematic for interlingual legal communication since certain fixed word combinations induce certain extra-linguistic actions in legal practice, thereby triggering legal consequences. A bad translation can cause the action intended by the sender to be omitted or another action to occur. Therefore, the didactization of legal phraseology for purposes of legal translation is a very important task for phraseodidactics. Since there is still no corresponding phraseodidactic approach, this paper proposes a didactic concept for the translation of legal phraseology to familiarize prospective and practicing legal translators with features of legal phraseology, teach them strategies for translating this phraseology, and show them how to develop tools for translating legal phraseology on its own. The paramount goal of such didactics is to ease the translation of legal phraseology and, ipso facto , improve the quality of interlingual legal communication. With this objective in mind, this article first outlines the most important prerequisites of legal translation and then highlights the features of legal phraseology, characterizing the individual types of legal phraseology by their communicative functions using German legal language as an example. Thereafter, the focus shifts to phraseodidactics, which can provide remedies for legal phraseology translation, analyzing the most important phraseodidactic methods so far proposed by phraseodidacticians. In concluding, the article presents a didactic concept for the translation of legal phraseology.

The use of machine translation (MT) systems by undergraduate and postgraduate students has been analysed in different studies (Sycz-Opoń and Gałuskina 2017; Jia et al. 2019; Loock and Léchauguette 2021, to mention a few). An analysis of the German-into-Basque translation of multi-word expressions (Sanz-Villar 2024) observed that students’ dependence on MT systems was very high; i.e., traces of the MT proposals were found in the outputs of translation trainees. To specifically analyse the impact of MT proposals on students’ translations, two tasks were designed in 2021 in which nine students participated. Both tasks consisted of translating an excerpt of a children’s literary text from German into Basque. The first translation task was done with the aid of MT tools and the second was a from-scratch translation where the use of MT systems was not allowed. The goal of the present study is to compare the results of both tasks, focusing on the translation of phraseological units (PUs) to observe the features of students’ translations accomplished with and without the aid of MT tools. Since students used MT outputs during the first translation task, machine-translated texts are also compared to human-translated ones. The results show that the tendency to retain the phraseological character of the original text is stronger in professional translations than in machine-translated texts. In general, reliance on MT system outputs when translating PUs is quite strong among trainee translators. When comparing the results of the two tasks, it was observed that for some students, the number of techniques used to maintain the phraseological level of the original text increased in the translation done without MT. Interestingly, examples of creative translations were found in the translations done without the aid of MT tools.

This article focuses on metaphorical collocations , a special subtype of lexical collocations in which the cohesion between the constituents is based on a lexicalised metaphor (see Reder 2006; Volungevičienė 2008; Konecny 2010a, 2010b, 2023). The word combinations in question can develop from originally free sequences into recurrent patterns appearing in several semantically related collocations if they occur repeatedly in similar contexts (see Stojić and Košuta 2020, 2021). A case in point is the German collocation die Zeit verfliegt and its equivalents in Croatian, English and Italian: vrijeme leti (‘time flies’), time flies (by) , and il tempo vola (via) (‘time flies (away)’), which convey a rapid movement and the feeling of time rushing by. The various patterns often also reflect cultural concepts and experiences; for example, a pattern that conceptualises time as a resource could be anchored in a cultural idea that regards time as something valuable. Metaphorical collocations thus frequently reflect superordinate conceptual metaphors that are located at a cognitive level and common to more than one language community. Nevertheless, the concrete language-specific manifestations may vary, and in many cases show only partial equivalence. Unlike idioms, where metaphor has long been recognised as a fundamental semantic process (see, e.g., Casadei 1996: passim; Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 2009: 19–29), collocations have not been thoroughly examined in this regard. It is therefore necessary to gain a more detailed insight into the semantic-cognitive processes underlying the creation of lexical combinations to draw conclusions regarding their relevance for the emergence of collocational sequences. This requires an analysis of extensive authentic language material, which will allow for the development of a catalogue of criteria that facilitates the identification and classification of these specific linguistic phenomena. This paper focuses on uncovering such processes based on a study carried out using SketchEngine in web corpora of German, Croatian, English, and Italian with the aim of creating a clear framework for the identification of metaphorical collocations by elaborating criteria that can serve as guidelines and by attempting a classification into subtypes. The proposed criteria and typology can contribute to the systematic investigation of metaphorical collocations and should also open up perspectives for future work in this field.

In Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Kövecses, 2020), I offered a comprehensive overhaul of “standard” conceptual metaphor theory. The present paper attempts to demonstrate how the new view of CMT can handle metaphorical idioms. To this end, I analyze four metaphorical idioms from the thematic area of money ( throw money about, money slips through someone’s fingers, be a cash cow, money keeps someone/something afloat ). The analysis assumes and starts out from the observation that money-related metaphors are based on two generic-level conceptual metaphors: money is a moving entity and money is a force. Extended CMT adds to CMT the notion of “mental space-level metaphors” that were largely ignored in “standard” CMT, but are given an important role in extended CMT. These are the metaphors that represent actual, contextual meanings in a metaphorical usage event. Traditional CMT-type analysis cannot account for the emergence of such idiomatic meanings because the mappings, or correspondences, of standard CMT work on a single, generic level (frame-, domain-, or even image schema level). However, the contextual meanings of naturally used metaphors (including those of metaphorical idioms) are much more information-rich and specific. The conceptual metaphors on the image schema, domain, and frame levels are offline structures in long-term memory, whereas the conceptual metaphors on the mental space level occur only online in working memory. In online communication, speakers mobilize the static image schema-, domain-, and frame-level metaphors at the mental space level, where they create highly specific mental space-level metaphors. Given this framework, it becomes possible to explain how and why the four metaphorical idioms have different contextual meanings (as represented by different mental space-level metaphors), but, at the same time, why they also share certain conceptual metaphors on the frame-, domain-, or image schema-level. Additionally, we gain new insight into how the emergence of novel metaphorical idioms occurs with the help of and constrained by a previously existing large system of hierarchically arranged conceptual metaphors.

As a class belonging to phraseology, winged words are characterized above all by the fact they are also used in other contexts as quotations, especially from literary texts (e.g., Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie from Goethes Faust I), thus acquiring a life of their own. However, they can be referred to the original sources in the consciousness of the language user. Forms of expression from areas other than literary areas, such as movies and television, advertising, etc., are increasingly gaining a comparable status in public language use. The imprinting of these expressions often stems from the fact that winged words are not only or no longer used as quotations but also used as a means of commenting on facts, evaluating them, etc., and at the same time calling up knowledge scenarios that refer to the original context of use as backgrounds for understanding. Over time, new patterns of expression may be established by modifying parts of the original formulation so that – expressed in construction grammar – new situationally adaptable form-meaning pairs can emerge. Based on this “phraseologization mechanism”, problematic aspects of phraseology theory are identified and discussed using the example of Das also war des Pudels Kern . Finally, suggestions are made for the conceptual sharpening of the category “winged words”.

Phraseological Units (PUs) in a language often include quotations and the so-called authorial “winged words” (“geflügelte Worte” in Gläser 1986), which have a single known author. These units, by gaining popularity among the members of a community of speakers, take on a life of their own as PUs. This study illustrates how these quotations acquire meanings and uses that do not match those of the original formulation they derive from, which, in turn, sheds light on how linguistic expressions at large reach conventionalization through language change. Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) ranks high among the authors who have contributed most to the English Phrasicon. This study investigates two case studies where quotations by Shaw have made their way into the English language as PUs. These quotations, however, are often used, as we shall see, in a way that differs from the sense they had in their original context. This study analyses how some novel PUs are coined and can help us map the processes of semantic adaptation these PUs undergo as they become conventional. It also provides insights into what constitutes a PU and how their defining characteristics apply in these cases.