Book review: Leszek Berezowski, Piotr Kładoczny, Jak redagować przekłady angielskich dokumentów prawniczych i gospodarczych? Poprawna polszczyzna dla tłumaczy [How to edit translations of English legal and economic documents? Correct Polish language for translators]

Abstract

This review discusses key difficulties in the translation of legal English documents into Polish (or the other way around) as identified by Berezowski and Kładoczny in their book Jak redagować przekłady angielskich dokumentów prawniczych i gospodarczych? Poprawna polszczyzna dla tłumaczy. The authors argue that, despite fluency in two or more languages, professional translators often take their mother tongue for granted. This in turn leads to proliferation of semantic (and syntactic) calques from English and, as a result, greater homogenisation of the Polish language. Moreover, they point out that the lack of naturalness in legal translation may be quite misleading to the recipient, thus recommending adopting, to some extent, the domestication strategy along with the functional approach.

Keywords

• legal translation
• domestication
• formulaic expressions
• habitual collocations
• declension
• binomials