The Language of Czech and Polish Civil Law Contracts: A Comparative Study Based on Corpus Research
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Methodological assumptions
- The current state of translation studies
- Corpus translation studies as a methodology for translation research
- Corpus analysis and its tools
- The corpus and its types
- Corpus analysis software
- National Corpus of Polish Language
- Czech National Corpus
- Criteria for the selection of source material
- Email questionnaire
- The process of translating specialised texts
- Translation of specialised texts: Dilemmas and challenges
- Translation process
- External perspective (user’s view)
- Translator’s view
- Tools in the work of a professional translator
- Parallel texts
- Translation strategies and techniques: Equivalence
- Position of Krzysztof Hejwowski
- Position of Maria Piotrowska
- Position of Vinay and Darbelnet
- Eugene Nida’s position in the context of translation strategies and techniques
- Position of Peter Newmark
- The position of Danuta Kierzkowska
- Position of Jerzy Pieńkos
- Position of Mona Baker
- Non-equivalent terms in specialist translations
- Glossary
- Professional texts
- Problems of translation of specialised texts
- Machine translation and post-editing
- Quality requirements in accordance with ISO 17100:2015
- Professional responsibility: The law on the profession of sworn translators in Poland and the Czech Republic
- Translation organisations and associations and their role in the work of professional translators
- Research section: Corpus analysis of the language of civil law contracts
- Aim of the research section
- Sources of Czech law: Typology of civil law contracts in the Czech legal system
- Sources of Polish law: Typology of civil law contracts in the Polish legal system
- Analysis of the lease agreement
- Summary
- Analysis of the donation agreement
- Summary
- Analysis of contract for a work of art
- Summary
- Analysis of the sales contract
- Summary
- Analysis of the contract of mandate
- Summary
- Analysis of the cooperation agreement
- Summary
- Conclusions and summary of the contract analysis
- Summary of the study and conclusions
- Summary of the research findings
- Environmental survey (email questionnaire and in-depth interview)
- Survey characteristics
- Email questionnaire
- Free in-depth interview
- Results of the study – conclusions and summary
- Translation agencies
- Notaries
- Law firms
- Accounting offices
- Translators and interpreters
- Entrepreneurs
- Summary
- Ending
- Resumé
- Summary
- Bibliography
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
Introduction
On 1 May 2004, Poland (and nine other countries, including the Czech Republic) joined the European Union through the Accession Treaty. This fact marked the beginning of many transformations on numerous levels: from political, economic, and social, to cultural and technological. The world around us and the way citizens function in it have changed. Poland’s opening up to other EU countries was also linked to changes in the area of the flow of goods and services, as well as the adaptation of the Polish legal system to EU requirements. As a consequence of these developments, the translation of texts has become a necessity and the translation profession has gained importance. Practical application of the translated texts showed that obtaining a good translation requires the work of an experienced and responsible translator with a range of competencies appropriate to the profession. The translation of specialised texts, whether in the field of law, economics, or finance, requires not only the completion of philological studies and an excellent command of the language, but also knowledge of various fields of economics, legal, or financial regulations, knowledge of the diversity of legal systems and, above all, the ability to prepare the right tools and use the right strategies during the translation process.
Although 17 years have passed since Poland and the Czech Republic joined the European Union, many questions and concerns still arise about the training of future translators and how to develop adequate translation skills so that the translations they produce meet EU requirements and, above all, are error-free. Translator training is not only about knowledge of language, translation strategies, and techniques, but also about making future students of translation aware of the responsibilities and impact of the profession.
This work, entitled The Language of Czech and Polish Civil Law Contracts: A Comparative Study Based on Corpus Research, is devoted to the problems of specialised texts in practical terms, the broadly understood translator’s workflow, as well as a comparative analysis of the texts of contractual agreements functioning in different legal systems – Czech and Polish.
The main objective of this study is to examine whether so-called translation universals – in the sense of the hypothesis put forward by Mona Baker – exist in specialist translations in the Czech-Polish language pair. A secondary aim of this work is to present the translation tools and techniques used by translators of specialised texts, as well as the ways in which translation strategies are chosen and the translator’s work is prepared.
The subject of the work is the translation techniques and strategies used in Czech-Polish translations of civil law contractual agreements. The research material in this work is a comparative corpus of civil law contract texts created by the author using Sketch Engine. The legal system of the source language is the Czech legal system, and the legal system of the target language is the Polish legal system. The research also used the reference corpus of EU legal texts EUR-Lex as a reference, Polish and Czech civil codes, as well as texts of civil law contracts functioning in the Czech and Polish legal systems without any intention of translation.
The work consists of three parts: a theoretical part consisting of two chapters, and a research part with conclusions.
The first part of the paper is theoretical in nature and is devoted to the methodological assumptions of the presented research project. The starting point is a review of previous translation studies, discussing the main trends in translation studies together with an indication of the profiles of their authors and representatives. A significant part of the discussion has been devoted to issues of corpus-based translation studies as a methodology for translation research. Although the paper is based on Slavic texts, the author also drew on research from the Anglo-Saxon research area. The work makes use of corpus research; therefore, this section also includes an explanation of what a corpus is, an outline of the idea of corpus research, and an indication and description of the types of corpora along with their purposes. An attempt has been made to justify why corpora deserve the attention of the translator of specialised texts, and how the translator can use them independently and even build them up and create further tools from them, such as glossaries. This leads on to the next section of the paper, in which the author describes the tools for implementing corpus-based research. As already noted, the research for this work was carried out using Sketch Engine, while the type of materials and how they were selected are described later in the work.
The second chapter of the work reflects the author’s research interests. An in-depth understanding of the translator’s craft, the role of the environment, and the process of translating specialised texts itself provided the impetus to reflect on opportunities to improve translation skills and competencies. This part of the work addresses the most topical issues in the translation community, namely machine translation, post-editing, and translation quality, in light of the PN EN 17100: 2015 standard of professional liability. The author shares the view that organisations and associations of translators play a significant role both in the professional work of translators as individuals and in the development of national procedures and policies through which quality standards of translation are maintained. This part of the work is based on a wealth of experience gained through many years of work as a translator of specialised texts, participation in conferences, field meetings, and interviews conducted in the community of specialised translators, and in the community of recipients of such translations. Issues of translation strategies such as foreignisation and domestication or the role of parallel texts during translation work and glossary development are also addressed.
The third part of the work – the research chapter – is empirical in nature and includes a presentation of the material obtained through corpus-based research. Six types of civil law contracts are the subject of this research. The author cites authentic texts without the intention of translation, characterising how they function in each legal system. She then carries out a comparative analysis, looking for differences and similarities in the areas of phraseology, terminology, syntax, and key concepts. The effect of the analysis is not only to provide a terminological base, but also to obtain information on the characteristic aspects of a given agreement, taking into account the legal system in which it operates and, consequently, how it is translated. Part three also presents the results of the research carried out using an email questionnaire and the in-depth interview method. Based on the assumption that translations of specialised texts are tools for realising the concepts and plans of translation clients, a community interview was carried out by e-mail and telephone among certified translators, lawyers, notaries, and entrepreneurs who commission translations of specialised texts. They were asked what the strengths and weaknesses of translating specialised texts are from the point of view of the end user. Respondents commented on the difficulty of receiving the translation, as well as the quality of the translation, which is very important to them. This is because the translation itself is not the problem, the crux of the matter is the issue of quality, which has a number of consequences for the user.
The research material for this study was collected between 2018 and 2021. A significant part of the work was written during two fellowship programmes. The first of these was the PROM programme, a 10-day stay at the Jan Długosz University of Humanities and Sciences in Częstochowa, during which the author conducted library research and gave a lecture to students on professional translation and the practice of translating specialist texts.
The second programme was a six-month research stay in cooperation with the University of Warsaw (scholarship from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic). As part of this programme, the author had the opportunity to learn about the methodology of corpus research at the Warsaw Faculty of Polish Studies, as well as to collect research material and meet with academics specialising in research within the same subject area. Aiming to ensure that the material for the section of the work dealing with machine translation, post-editing, translation practice, and the professional responsibility of translators is as up to date a reflection of the situation of the translation community as possible, the author collected this material over a three-year period at various industry conferences. They were: the Translation and Localization Conference in Warsaw KTLC (2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021), the Conference of the Directorate-General for Translation in Brussels Translating Europe Forum (2019, 2020, 2021), the Conference of the Lublin Translators’ Association and the Maria-Curie Skłodowska University in Lublin Konferencja z pozytwnym przesłaniem (2021), the Conference of the Polish Society of Sworn and Specialised Translators (TEPIS) (2021), and the Czech Union of Interpreters and Translators (JTP) Jeronýmovy dny (2020, 2021). The above activities were complemented by the author’s active participation in six academic conferences.
1 Methodological assumptions
1.1. The current state of translation studies
The art of translation is of interest to many eminent scholars. The 20th century brought a number of interesting, often surprising, and groundbreaking theories in this area. Since this work is devoted to the issues of translation and interlingual and intercultural communication, the author has decided to present an overview of the main trends and theories concerning this topic and to recall the most important researchers in contemporary translation studies.
There are two books that are well-known to a Polish audience interested in translation issues. The first is a paper from the second half of the 1990s by Alicja Pisarska and Teresa Tomaszkiewicz, entitled Współczesne tendencje przekładoznawcze. The second is Współczesne teorie przekładu by Piotr Bukowski and Magda Heydel. Both works describe the development of the most important translation theories of the 20th century. Bukowski and Heydel also wrote the noteworthy book Polska myśl przekładoznawcza, which was published in 2013 by the Jagiellonian University Publishing House.
It is impossible to think of a contemporary work devoted to translation studies without reference to Roman Jakobson. His article (Jakobson, 1959) on the linguistic aspects of translation marked the beginning of a new phase of research. Roman Jakobson coined the term ‘equivalence-in-difference’, and he also believed that any cognitive experience can be expressed in any existing language (Bukowski, Heydel, 2009: 45). He also created the concept of distinguishing three types of translation: intra-linguistic, inter-linguistic and intersemiotic. His work stated that translation is the transfer of symbols, and symbols are interpreted by means of other symbols, that translation is a matter of words and an element of the linguistic tradition, and that linguistic theories of translation are based on comparisons between the structures of the source language and the target language (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz, 1996: 13).
A figure whose activities and research stimulated the discussion of translation in linguistic and anthropological-cultural terms was Eugene A. Nida. A central concept in his theory is equivalence (Nida, after: Bukowski, Heydel, 2009: 9), which will appear in the considerations later in this work. Nida called his theory the ‘science of translation’. Nida’s notion of dynamic (functional) equivalence means that the translator focuses not so much on the source text itself, but on how it will be received in the target language. Nida believed that the essence of translation rests in reproducing in the target language the most accurate natural equivalent of the content conveyed in the original language, first in terms of meaning and then in terms of style (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz, 1996: 14).
Another figure worth mentioning besides Nida is the Czech researcher Jiří Levý, a well-known linguist and translation theorist who wrote the famous 1963 work The Art of Translation. In it, Levý argues that the interpreter’s job is a decision-making process, during which he or she must choose one solution from the many options available. By substituting one linguistic material for another in the translation process, the translator is forced to shape all the linguistic artistic devices used in the text independently (Levý, after: Bukowski, Heydel, 2009: 80).
The German field of translation studies, inspired by Nida’s theory, was moving towards the study of equivalence. The strand of linguistic research known as Übersetzungswissenschaft was represented by Wolfram Wilss and Werner Koller, while the so-called Leipzig School included researchers such as Otto Kade, Gert Jäger, and Albrecht Neubert. Übersetzungswissenschaft sought to apply the principles of the mathematical sciences to its research into questions of equivalence, thereby rejecting traditional translation theory. Wilss, investigating the process of translation, which he called transfer, started from a communicative model of translation operations (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz, 1996: 24).
Another German scholar, Hans Vermeer, who countered the claim ‘that translation is primarily a matter of language’ (ibid.), also developed an important theory on translation. In his understanding, translation is largely a cross-cultural transfer. The translator must not only be proficient in the foreign language but also have a broad knowledge of the target language’s culture, as language is an integral part of it, and it is impossible to translate a text without adequate erudition. The creator of skopos theory argues that an essential feature of translation is its purpose. The researcher treats the text holistically, against the background of the culture in which it functions.
Translation studies from the French academic field have emphasised the extra-linguistic sphere, namely the communicative context and the different types of texts. Maurice Pergnier, a representative of French sociolinguistic research, focused on the problems of translation in the context of a communicative situation. A context mediating meaning is a context in terms of the situation parameter as well as a strictly textual context (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz, 1996: 28).
This setting of translation issues shifts the focus from an interest in linguistic problems or language comparison towards an analysis of the meaning of the text. Understood in this way, translation and the analysis of its impact on the recipient is an act of communication, and the field that provides the tools of analysis for the translation researcher is sociolinguistics (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz, 1996: 29).
This view of the problem of translation was also shared by another French researcher, Jean Delisle. The so-called Paris School, of which Delisle was a representative, developed an interpretive theory of translation, based on similar assumptions to those considering the contribution of communication theory and pragmatics to the translation model. Here, Danica Seleskovitch, who formulated theories based on her own professional experiences as a conference and simultaneous interpreter, played an important role. Consequently, the central point of her interest is ‘the thought mechanisms of the translator, who interprets the meaning of the original, on the basis of linguistic signs, as well as on the basis of his own knowledge, feelings and experiences […] translation is not analysed from a comparative point of view as a finished product, but as a creative process’ (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz, 1996: 30).
Within the circle of French linguistic research, the names of three more well-known researchers should be noted: Jean-Claude Margot, Jean-René Ladmiral, and Henri Meschonnic. They are united by basing their theses and theories on their own experiences in the translation profession. Margot believes that ‘translation should be faithful to the source text, the target language and the recipient of the translation’ (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz, 1996: 30). The textual approach is also shared by Ladmiral, who in turn defines translation as an act of communication at the speech level. He recognises that it must be taken into account that the translator, in the process of translation, performs an act of interpretation of the source text and translatological choices. Meschonnic, on the other hand, argues that translation is a translinguistic activity. It also opposes Nida’s approach, in which content dominates over form. In Meschonnic’s view, the process of translation requires both elements (content and form) to be taken into account equally.
Details
- Pages
- 318
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631908754
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631910702
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631908983
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21323
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (December)
- Keywords
- Analytical methods Golden section Musical ambiguity Musical hermeneutics Musical plagiarism Musical similarity Schenkerian analysis
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2023. 318 pp., 10 fig. col.
