A case study of complex prepositions in L2 English Translations of Written Pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights

This study addresses the combination of conventional (overrepresented) and creative (transferred) tendencies in written pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights translated by L2 translators from Russian into English, including forms of interference (discourse transfer) and translation universals. The assumption behind it is that regularities of the targeted domain – legal English – tend to be reflected to a greater extent in translation under the influence of the overrepresentation phenomenon. At the same time, discourse transfer markers transpose source-text specific elements into the target texts. The analysis is carried out at the level of complex prepositions, comparing corpora across languages. The research uses both qualitative and quantitative investigation tools, and makes recourse to corpus linguistics using WordSmith Tools 6.0 and AntConc 3.4.3 software for lexical analysis and text search. The results may be of some use for Russian-to-English translators, helping them avoid use of unnatural or overly conservative patterns.