Abstract
The present paper presents Polish and British incongruent terms referring to civil law (family law) and constitutes an attempt to assess the adequacy of the English equivalents of the analysed Polish terms. The terms appear in the last part of the Family and Guardianship Code under the title Opieka i kuratela and are listed in the subject index of the Code. The equivalents in question appear in the Polish Family and Guardianship Code translation into English and in bilingual Polish- English dictionaries. The definitions of the Polish civil law terms are presented beginning with the definitions of a term and equivalence. The definitions cited below of the Polish terms appear in an up-to-date commentary on the Polish Family and Guardianship Code. In the process of assessing the adequacy of their equivalents, the appearance of equivalents in the sources of British law has been checked, and the legal definitions of equivalents have been presented if needed. The translation methods applied while forming the equivalents have been determined, which has revealed the dominant role of the functional equivalent method in translating incongruent family law terms. Keywords: equivalence, family law, term, functional equivalent, incongruity.
Highlights
The present paper aims to present Polish and British incongruent terms referring to civil law and makes an attempt to assess the adequacy of the English equivalents of the Polish terms analysed
One may conclude that the equivalent “curatorship” constitutes a functional equivalent of the Polish term under discussion as it appears in the sources of British law and the function of the legal institution it names is the same as that of the Polish legal phenomenon
The most common translation method used to form equivalents for incongruent terms that appear in bilingual dictionaries and The Code translation into English is a functional equivalent
Summary
The present paper aims to present Polish and British incongruent terms referring to civil law (family law) and makes an attempt to assess the adequacy of the English equivalents of the Polish terms analysed. The equivalents discussed come from four bilingual legal dictionaries and one translation of the Polish Family and Guardianship Code into English. Legal terminology characteristic of different legal systems is to a large extent conceptually incongruent [11, p. “Because of the inherent incongruence of the terminology of different legal systems, natural equivalents of the target legal system that are identical to their source terms at the conceptual level cannot be used but the closest natural equivalent (the equivalent that most accurately conveys the legal sense of the source term and leads to desired results) can be chosen” [12, p. “Because of the inherent incongruence of the terminology of different legal systems, natural equivalents of the target legal system that are identical to their source terms at the conceptual level cannot be used but the closest natural equivalent (the equivalent that most accurately conveys the legal sense of the source term and leads to desired results) can be chosen” [12, p. 234–235]
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