Volume 34 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

The paper aims to analyse and compare the interpretative function of legislative history in the judicial activity of the European Court of Justice and Polish courts.

The authors have analysed judgments of the respective courts, focusing on the role of legislative history in their argumentation. In the Polish and European doctrine, the usefulness of travaux preparatoires has been underestimated. Nevertheless, legislative history may provide arguments important in judicial reasoning both in uni- and multilingual legal systems. However, its importance and functions in Polish and European cases examined herein are different. The research conducted enables a better understanding of the interpretative value of legislative history in legal interpretation and can result in more frequent use of this tool in the judicial activity of national and European courts.

Most interpretational problems in law pertain to the meaning of words. However, in this paper I address problems caused in Polish courts by grammar (namely: syntax and inflexion) of legal provisions. One can distinguish five main sources of grammatical issues in judicial interpretation of law: syntax of a sentence (i.e. order of words), conjunctive words (i.e. i, lub), punctuation marks (i.e. comma, semicolon, dash), nominal grammatical categories (i.e. number, gender), verbal grammatical categories (i. e. aspect, tense, mood). Traditional Polish canons of interpretation offer no clues on how to deal with such issues, stating only that statutes should be construed in accordance with the rules of grammar. In fact, cases in which such interpretational issues occur, are decided in a highly incoherent manner. The courts tend to feel a tension between grammatical form of a provision and its purpose, function, or other extra-linguistic values. I think the main reason of such controversy is a very limited vision of grammar shared by the courts, stemmed from primary school rather than contemporary linguistic theories.

The article deals with basic requirements to the translation for specific purposes, namely legal translation. The problem posed here is defining object and theoretical basis of legal translation. The question of the necessity of information search as an integral part of translation strategy has been raised. Detailed analysis revealed that the requirements of professional translators include knowledge of lexical and grammatical peculiarities of both languages in legal sphere; deep understanding of the concepts employed by specialists in particular field and the specialist terms used to express these concepts and their relationships in the source and target languages. It is recommended that evaluation of the translation may be done on the following principles: communicative pragmatic norms of translation; equivalent norms of translation; absence of contextual, cultural, functional, lexico-grammatical mistakes.

The focus of this paper is centered on the translation of German and Polish court names. Based on a thorough analysis of the translation terms used in legal literature and dictionaries, the author concludes that the court names are often being translated in a way that makes it impossible for the reader to correctly identify the institution in question, thus undermining the comprehensibility of the target texts significantly.

Pointing to the differences between the court systems of Germany and Poland, the author contemplates whether the dissimilarities between two institutions from different legal systems need always to be marked in the translation. On the basis of the comparative law theory, the meaning features essential for both legal communication and legal translation are identified and presented.

In the next part, the author examines how to translate the court names so that the institution at issue is instantly recognizable in the target text. As a result, three comprehensive translation techniques are proposed.

The presented translation techniques shall contribute to improving the comprehensibility of legal texts, and constitute an alternative to the descriptive translation of these institutions.