Corpora in Legal Translation: Overcoming Terminological and Phraseological Assymetries between Czech and English

Abstract

The paper deals with the role of small-scale corpora of legal language in overcoming terminological and phraseological assymetries between Czech and English. The first part of the paper describes the potential as well as the specifics of the use of such corpora in legal linguistics. The second part of the paper presents selected outcomes of a study involving a comparable-parallel corpus architecture to study the terminology and phraseology of company law in English and Czech. A number of examples are discussed to demonstrate the usefulness of such corpora as a complement to dictionaries and other resources available to translators working with languages of limited diffusion, such as Czech, for identifying terminological and phraseological equivalence in less straightforward cases. The final part discusses the implications for legal translation practice as well as translation training.