A Potential of Legal Terminology to be Translated: The Case of ‘Regulation’ Translated into Ukrainian

DOI: 10.1007/s11196-023-10034-x

ABSTRACT

The study focuses on the translatability of EU terminology into Ukrainian, with aspecific emphasis on the term ‘regulation’. It explores the challenges and consid-erations involved in translating legal terms, particularly within the context of EUlegislative acts. The concept of translatability potential is substantiated in the article.It is seen as language pair-dependent, influenced by the availability of similar legalconcepts in the target law system, equivalent terms in the target language, and otherfactors. The research delves into the levels of translatability potential of legal terms,taking into consideration the existence of identical concepts in the target legal sys-tem, the mono- or polysemic semantic structure of the source term, and the estab-lished translation practices accepted by legal professionals. Based on these criteria,legal terms are classified into categories of high, upper-medium, lower-medium,and low translatability potentials. The article applies these criteria to analyse thetranslatability potential of the term ‘EU regulation’ in Ukrainian legal discourse.The distinction between legal terms and legal concepts are highlighted, and the con-cepts are considered to be mental representations associated with linguistic units.The corpus method and concept analysis are employed to analyse the impact of thecontext on the actualisation of specific components of semantic structure and, cor -respondingly, specific concepts. The use of the terms in ordinary and legal discourseis under analysis, as well as different Ukrainian translations of ‘regulation’ for eachconcept it manifests. Finally, the semantic structures of the term ‘EU regulation’ andits Ukrainian translation ‘peглaмeнт (rehlament)’ are compared to reveal the seman-tic shifts caused by translation. The concept and semantic analyses are conductedto explore the realisation of the translatability potential and see if the best optionprovided by the potential of the term was selected to meet the high requirements oflegal translation.

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(PDF) A Potential of Legal Terminology to be Translated: The Case of ‘Regulation’ Translated into Ukrainian. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374055004_A_Potential_of_Legal_Terminology_to_be_Translated_The_Case_of_'Regulation'_Translated_into_Ukrainian [accessed May 02 2025].