TRANSLATION OF DOCUMENTS WITH REFERENCE TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LEGISLATION

Victoria CRAVCENCO Universitatea de Stat din Moldova

Аннотация

EU legislation covers all areas of human life and activity. Most legislative acts are translated into all the languages of the member states. Various EU institutions periodically publish glossaries, practical, methodological and stylistic guides to ensure correct interpretation and use of the EU legislation terminology. But what would be the right solution in case of collaboration between two countries, one of which is a member state of the European Union and the other one is not? Will it be right to use the terminology of Romanian legislation in case of the Republic of Moldova? What to do if some concepts or terms do not coincide? Is it right to use several synonyms in the same document? We have decided to study a corpus of EU legislation, in particular that of Romania, as compared with Moldovan legislation and some US laws in order to observe the difference between the terms used. This paper includes some practical recommendations which can be used for quality assurance in translation, as well as in managerial activities, decision-making, preparation of official documents, and staff training. Special attention is paid to work on bilingual or multilingual parallel corpora of official texts which we call reference documents. The suggested approach is an example of best practice which allows finding up-to-date standardized terminology and legal definitions of the main terms, the right understanding of which is crucial. Keywords: specialized translation, legal terminology, acquis communautaire, EU legislation, national legislation, legal definition, reference documents, parallel corpus, computer-assisted translation, applied linguistics.