Biel, Łucja (2014): Lost in the Eurofog: The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 347 p.

Let me start with a sporting analogy. Every two years Ireland and Australia compete in a football match using a set of compromise rules agreed by the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Australian Football League. The resulting sport is a hybrid game containing elements of both national sports (the Australians for example must come to terms with a round ball and the Irish have to adapt to the more robust tackle that is a feature of the Australian game). The making of EU law is also all about compromise. Legal texts are kicked around from one institution to another and are subject to various linguistic inputs which make it impossible to determine what the original text is. Bengoetxea describes the process thus: Given this peculiarity of the genesis of EU legal texts it is perhaps not surprising that national languages undergo a transformation in the translation process, a bridge between the seemly contradictory goals of ever closer legal integration and the preservation of multilingualism (Baaij 2016). In her groundbreaking study, Biel, drawing on the concept of textual fit, seeks to determine the extent of this transformation in the case of translations of EU law into Polish. Textual fit is a linguistic distance between translations and non-translations of a comparable genre. To measure this distance the author uses the methodologies of corpus linguistics. A number of corpora are analyzed to facilitate this task (JRC EN acquis, JRC PL acquis, pre-accession and post-accession corpora of national Polish law and the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP)). The comparison leads her to conclude: This concept of ‘eurolect’ (coined by analogy with the term ‘sociolect’) has been used to denote the language used within the institutions themselves and in the texts produced by those same institutions for the citizens of the EU (Goffin 1994). This aspect of EU legal languages has recently become the subject of increased academic attention. The UNINT project contains Eurolect Observatory for the Interlingual and intralingual analysis of EU legal varieties.  The languages used in the EU sub-corpus are compared with matching national transposition measures. The divergences between EU legal Polish and the national variety are listed (pp. 289-292). These include a higher mean sentence length, an increased depersonalization through the passive voice and impersonal patterns, a greater variation and instability of terminological equivalents and an overrepresentation of obligation modals (musi, powinien, należy). As a modal, należy combines with an infinitive to form an impersonal agent-defocusing structure, in which an entity on which the obligation is imposed is not mentioned in the subject position or at all (pp. 158-166). This shifts the focus to a verb and its object. Należy is three times more common in regulations and five times more common in directives than in Polish law. Its use differs in and across translations where it functions as a modal accompanied by an infinitive, imposing an obligation, in particular in annexes to directives: Lawyer-linguists at the EU institutions are instructed to reserve ‘shall’ for the enacting provisions. A variety of other means are called upon to express obligation in the recitals and other parts of EU legal acts (should, is/are to, must, etc.). It has raised interpretation issues in many a jurisdiction. Gémar (1995) discusses its translation into French in legal texts. Should it be viewed through a grammatical lens as an auxiliary which at first glance appears to express the future or alternatively should it be examined in the context of legal discourse as an element of syntax, as part of a sentence? The divergence between the two varieties is attributed in part to interference of the …