tv.um.es

The European Union, as a political and economic project, is characterized by its
supranational nature and primacy of EU law over national law of the member states.
Under the motto “United in Diversity”, 28 Member States speak with a single voice in every EU legislative act through 24 official EU languages. This long and complex legislative procedure takes place in a multilingual and multicultural environment, which involves translation in several steps as a way to overcome cultural and language chasms and achieve compromise between all interveners. For this reason, as pointed out by Biel(2014, 335-336), not only the translation of multilingual EU law is a category in its own right, but it also challenges central concepts of translation studies, such as source text, target text, translation process and equivalence. The language used by the EU institutions is known as Eurolect, a term coined by Goffin (1994), and preferred to Eurospeak, Eurofog, Eurolegalese, eurobabillage, Euronebel, etc. These names have a negative
connotation, consonant with the generally cold reception of EU norms. Sentences without fluency, non-idiomatic constructions, and supranational concepts conveyed with an unfamiliar terminology are some of the complaints presented by national law operators (e.g. attorneys, judges, notaries). Nevertheless, “the Eurolects are a surprisingly rare object of research within Translation Studies and other disciplines” (Biel 2016, 199). Notable exemptions are the research activities undertaken by the Eurolect Observatory led by Professor Mori (Faculty of Interpreting and Translation of Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT), Professor Biel’s projects ‘The Eurolect: an EU variant of Polish and its impact on administrative Polish‘ (2015-2018) and ‘Eurofog‘ (2010-2012), as well as Professor McAuliffe’s project ‘Law,Language and Translation at the European Court of Justice‘ (Universisity of Birmingham). In view of the above, we intend to conduct a corpus-base study of the Portuguese Eurolect, by extracting and analysing specialised phraseologic units (SPUs) used in directives (C1– corpus 1), corresponding transposition laws (C2 – corpus 2) and Portuguese legislation not related to the EU (C3 – corpus 3) concerning environmental law in the period of 1985-2018. As defined by Bevilacqua (1998, 1999), SPUs are syntagmatic units (noun and verb phrases) that include a term among their elements, have a certain degree of fixation, and display relevant frequency in a set of texts or a specialized domain. This paper aims to explain the corpus design, as well as the steps required to build C1 – the primary version of the Portuguese Eurolect and product of interlinguistic translation, C2 – national implementing measures of intralinguistic transposition or rewriting, and C3 – disperse legislation without connection to the EU, in order to extract SPUs. Portugal is not part of any of the abovementioned projects, and according to our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study this phenomenon.