Considering foreignization and domestication in EU legal translation: a corpus-based study

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigates foreignizing and domesticating strategies in the translation of EU legislative texts. It starts by briefly introducing the dichotomy between foreignizing and domesticating translations, which has recently been revisited in the field of legal translation. Intrigued by assertions that the translation of a normative text should be primarily foreignizing in order to express the intention of the legislator and criticisms of current EU translation practices for lack of effectiveness due to an approach combining both translation strategies by means of a parallel corpus of EU legislative texts we examine to what extent the two opposing translation strategies are used in the translation of EU law, putting the emphasis on the terminological level. Bearing in mind that the latter field is still relatively unknown this corpus-based study aims to provide more insight into the research of EU translation. While the results of the conducted corpus analysis evidence a mixture of both of these translation strategies, foreignization elements are especially visible in the overuse of nominalizations and in the translation of abbreviations.