Incongruity of Civil Law Terms Under Polish and British Legal Systems: A Study of Translation Methods

Abstract

The present paper introduces seven Polish and British incongruent terms referring to civil law and makes an attempt to determine the translation methods applied while forming English equivalents for the Polish terms (“mienie”, “rzecz”, “nieruchomość rolna”, “część składowa”, “część składowa rzeczy”, “część składowa gruntu”, “przynależność”). The terms under analysis are the terms that appear at the very beginning of the third section of the Polish Civil Code called “Mienie” and constitute “terms” according to Sager (1990, p.19) and “legal terms” according to the division of terms by Morawski (1980, p. 187). The definitions of the Polish civil law terms are presented beginning with the definitions of a “term” and “equivalence”. The equivalents under analysis have been suggested in the IATE database and the most globally recognised forum for translators, “proz.com”. The research involves comparing the definitions of the terms and, if possible, the suggested equivalents, checking whether the equivalents appear in texts of the sources of the law of the United Kingdom. It has been concluded that the occurrence of system-bound terms as well as the phenomenon of the incongruity of terms make the process of translation extremely challenging, and it is difficult to find the single most adequate equivalent. Furthermore, the translation methods applied while forming the English equivalents have been determined.

Keywords

• equivalence
• civil law
• term
• incongruity
• functional equivalent
• culture-bound term