Karolina Kaczmarek

The methods of expressing obligation in English, Hungarian, and Polish statutory instruments

The authors analyze the structure of imperative clauses in English, Hungarian, and Polish statutory instruments, including the EU ones. The emphasis is put on the exponents of modal meanings used in the above-mentioned three languages. The clauses are analysed from a semantic and syntactic perspective. Grammatical and lexical exponents of deontic modality in English, Hungarian, and Polish are compared. The semantic components constituting modally marked utterances are described.

Wykładnia normy prawnej a metodologia przekładu

The authors discuss the problems connected with the construction of legal texts done by translators and lawyers. First, the methods of the construction of statutory instruments used by Polish lawyers are discussed and compared with translation strategies. Both lawyers and translators must apply intralingual translation for different purposes. Lawyers do it in order to apply the law in practice, and translators do it in order to perform interlingual translation. Next, the following legal interpretation methods are touched upon: (i) linguistic construction, (ii) system construction, (iii) functional construction, (vi) comparative construction, (v) literal construction, (vi) expansion and (vii) restriction. They are compared with respective translation methods: (i) linguistic analysis, (ii) context-based analysis, (iii) Kierzkowska’s legal translation strategy based on the skopos theory of Vermeer, (iv) comparison of parallel texts, (v) literal or word-for-word translation, (vi) explicitation, and finally (vii) implicitation. Moreover, the authors point out that the unnecessary application of some of those translation strategies and methods may lead to the undesirable side effects such as information loss, information addition, mistranslation, etc. Furthermore, the methods of providing equivalence based on the construction of legal texts for the purpose of interlingual translation are given to stress the differences between intralingual and interlingual translation.