Overrepresentation of English legal style markers in L2 translations from Russian of written pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights

This study addresses the issue of overrepresentation in L2 translations of written pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights translated from Russian into English. The research is based on the probabilistic statement that there are certain translation-induced techniques that are referred to as 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. The analysis of a corpus of authentic pleadings prepared by L2 translators provides confirmatory evidence to certain patterns of overrepresentation, with regard to the so-called “functional vocabulary” as well as phraseological aspects, comparing corpora across languages. Another issue under scrutiny is the frequent use of shall in translations which contrasts the linguistic choices of the reference corpus, designating a significant shift. While there is ample support for the shall-free style in legal English, the data gathered in this study prove shall to be still the preferred choice in the translated pleadings for both deontic and adeontic functions, which is believed to be a marker of overrepresentation. The research uses both qualitative and quantitative investigation tools, and makes recourse to corpus linguistics using WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott 2015) software for lexical analysis and text search. The results may also be of some use for Russian-to-English translators, helping them avoid interference, use of unnatural patterns and conceptual errors.