How do supranational terms transfer into national legal systems? A corpus-informed study of EU English terminology in consumer protection directives and UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supranational terms related to consumer protection transfer into domestic legal systems of three English-language jurisdictions (the UK, Ireland and Malta) during the transposition of EU directives. Transposition is a process of incorporating EU directives into national law and capturing supranational terms during their entry into national legal systems. We adopt a mixed-method approach of corpus linguistics and legal analysis of terms, working with a corpus of five directives and their UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts. Distinguishing between a term and a concept level, we propose a categorisation of transfer techniques arranged along a cline from foreignization to domestication. They involve imports, modifications (non-denominative and denominative variants), localisations and zero transfer both at the term level and the concept level. © John Benjamins Publishing Company