Abstract
When transposing EU directives into national laws, Finnish drafters usually alter the wording of the directive. This paper describes these modifications and offers some insights into the reasons behind them. The study is based on a corpus of Finnish versions of EU directives and of Finnish laws that transpose those directives.
Highlights
IntroductionTo determine whether the influence of any Community law is detectable in the language of Finnish statutes, the Institute for the Languages of Finland compiled a corpus in 2003–2006 of laws enacted from government bills submitted in 2002 to implement the EU directives with which they are associated
Often modification seems to be a matter of style, and some of the modifications reveal an attempt to comply with general stylistic ideals by avoiding, for example, unnecessary repetition of similar lexical or morphological items or avoiding expressions deprecated for reasons of purism
Some modifications seem to originate from a stylistic ideal that especially applies to legal language, namely clarity, or plain legal language, and are encouraged by generally accepted style guides, but reinforced by tutoring in schools and writing courses in working life
Summary
To determine whether the influence of any Community law is detectable in the language of Finnish statutes, the Institute for the Languages of Finland compiled a corpus in 2003–2006 of laws enacted from government bills submitted in 2002 to implement the EU directives with which they are associated. This corpus suggests that directives do not influence the sentence and clause structures of Finnish laws, at least not in quantitative terms A comparison of the most common words in the corpus failed to reveal any significant influence of directives, as these words did not constitute specialised terms from laws or directives
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