Variation of legal terms in monolingual and multilingual contexts

Abstract

This chapter investigates the variation of legal terminology – types, distribution, attitudes towards it and causes in monolingual and multilingual settings. The chapter proposes the typologies of legal variants according to: formal/conceptual distance (linguistic, denominative, conceptual), time (synchronic, diachronic), acceptance (preferred, permitted, deprecated, proposed) and distribution (intrasystemic, intersystemic, hybrid variants). Attitudes to legal variants vary: linguistic and denominative variation tends to be regarded as undesirable – as a violation of the consistency and continuity principles while conceptual variation may be a useful drafting technique. The final part adapts Freixa’s (2006) typology of the causes of variation (functional, dialectal, discursive, cognitive, interlinguistic) to the legal context, extending it to include causes related to formal and conceptual properties of terms that trigger variation in translation.