Culturally Immersed Legal Terminology on the Example of Forest Regulations in Poland, The United Kingdom, The United States of America and Germany

Abstract

The importance of forests is reflected in the national forest legislation which has been developed and implemented in European countries over recent years. Due to regional and national specificities, forest regulations include culturally immersed terms specific to the described area. The aim of this paper is to analyses the culturally driven legal terms existing in specific legal regulations concerning forestry in Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Poland, and identify possible ways of translating them. In order to take the interdisciplinary nature of the issue into account, the degree of hybridity of the selected texts will be examined by means of corpus analysis. The methodology applied in the paper uses a comparative approach. Additionally, the authors also resort to the aforementioned corpus analysis, as well as the analysis of comparable texts and the analysis of terminology according to the three categories of equivalence as determined by Šarčević (New Approach to Legal translation, Kluwer Law International, Hague, 1997), and the techniques of providing equivalents for non-equivalent or partially equivalent terms (Matulewska A, in: Lingua Legis in Translation, Peter Lang Publishing House, 2007) as research methods. The material used for analysis comes from selected German, English and Polish legal acts regulating forest management and maintenance that are considered as corpora for the selection of culturally immersed terminology, namely: (i) the Polish Act on Forests of 28th September 1991 [Ustawa z dnia 28 września 1991 r. o lasach], (ii) Title 16 U.S. Code Chapter 2—National Forests, (iii) Forestry Act 1967, Chapter 10 (the United Kingdom), (iv) German Forestry Act 1975 [Gesetz zur Erhaltung des Waldes und zur Förderung der Forstwirtschaft (Bundeswaldgesetz) von 1975]. The paper concerns potential problems that could occur in the translation of culturally immersed legal terminology due to the terms’ rigidity and high degree of specificity. The studies presented will allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the possibilities and strategies for translating culturally immersed terms. In addition, the availability of terminological dictionaries for these language pairs will be discussed.