Applicability of EU multilingual resources: A case study of the translation into English of legal vocabulary in the judicial context of Spain

• Published in: Babel (Frankfurt) 2017, Vol.63 (6), p.861-889
• Main Author: Killman, Jeffrey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: English language; Legal language; Multilingualism; Spanish language; Terminology; Translation
• ISSN: 0521-9744; 1569-9668
• DOI: 10.1075/babel.00018.kil

Vocabulary is often considered one of the most difficult aspects of translating legal texts, and finding reliable textual supports is often a challenge too. This study presents the results of an experiment to use, as often as possible, multilingual EU resources with versions in Spanish and English as textual supports for a large sample of vocabulary that warranted research when the author was involved in translating into English a voluminous text of judgment summaries produced by the Supreme Court of Spain. In the majority of cases it was indeed possible to find high quality translations in EUR-Lex (Access to European Law) and IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe), signaling, on the one hand, significant legal language overlap possibilities between the EU and Spain and, on the other, great potential for employing the former’s linguistic resources in the translation of the latter’s legal texts. Moreover, this study analyzes the results with an eye to linking the different types of vocabulary items that were searched to the different types of textual supports they were found in, to see how different kinds of supports (a collection of texts and their translations, such as EUR-Lex, or a multilingual terminological resource, such as IATE) might pair well with different kinds of vocabulary items. In this way the study also addresses some of the different opinions surrounding using online collections of texts and their translations (i.e. multilingual corpora) vs. multilingual terminological resources.