The “New Normal” Terminology: A Corpus-Based Study Into Term Variation in COVID-19-Related EU Legislative Texts

Abstract

This paper provides a contrastive analysis of COVID-19-related EU legislative texts with emphasis on term variants. The analysis carried out on a parallel corpus consisting of English and Croatian texts has identified multiple examples of variation of predominately multi-word terms at several levels. These include orthographic and grammatical variants, unit shifts and denominative variants creating different meanings. The findings support other contemporary studies into variation within specialized language, highlighting the importance of studying variation to gain understanding about the dynamics of domain knowledge. By focusing on variation in a parallel corpus, conclusions are drawn about the prevalence of variation in a newer EU official language, as opposed to English as the draft text of EU legislation.

Keywords

• institutional translation
• parallel corpus
• terminology variation
• Croatian
• English
• COVID-19