Legal style markers and their translation : In written pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights

This corpus-based study investigates language use in the occluded genre of written pleadings before the European Court of Human Rights through the paradigms of legal phraseology and Translation Studies. The analysis is carried out on three subcorpora of authentic texts: (a) pleadings translated from Russian into English, (b) pleadings translated from Italian into English and (c) pleadings originally drafted in English. Legal language is intricate and formulaic, and frequently makes recourse to prefabricated patterns and routines. Legal phraseology is a major challenge for professional legal translators, and yet its translation has not received much scholarly attention until recently. Legal phraseological units are prefabricated patterns that form the matrix of legal texts and reveal interesting information about both the language and structure of the genre of written pleadings. Over the last thirty years, linguistic deviations occurring in the translation process have constituted one of the main areas within Translation Studies. It has been postulated that translated language has distinctive linguistic characteristics. Legal translation, in addition to linguistic factors, is conditioned by the tension between the legal systems involved, which can result in peculiar language dynamics in the translation of legal texts. This study draws inspiration from Toury’s (1995) and Chesterman’s (2004a) works to describe the different dynamics of translated language, applying a combination of translation norms and universals to identify and describe regularities in translated pleadings. This work is carried out using both linguistic and translational insights in order to demonstrate empirically how written pleadings can be characterised in terms of their phraseological content and how translated pleadings differ from non-translated pleadings. Distributional patterns of recurrent and anomalous legal phraseological units are compared across the corpora and analysed for typicality of frequencies and patterning as well as for quantity and quality of linguistic variation. The results contain a list of legal style markers typical of this genre, obtained in a translational and phraseological perspective. The list supplements the rather scant information about the language of written pleadings at the European Court of Human Rights. The analysis also provides confirmatory evidence of the differences between translated and non-translated texts, specifically, proving the co-existence of two opposite tendencies in translation: conventionalisation (translation of source text textemes with conventional repertoremes of the target environment) and discourse transfer (introduction of prefabricated patterns from the source language). The results may also be of some use and applicability for Russian-to-English and Italian-to-English translators, helping them avoid interference, use of unnatural or overly conservative patterns.