What it is
A complex preposition is a connector of several words doing the work a single preposition does elsewhere: in accordance with, by virtue of, for the purposes of. It carries no concept of its own, which is why it is easy to read past and easy to get wrong.
The class earns a record because of what it does in the sentence. Biel's functional account puts these connectors in referencing patterns of authority and of conflict, in conditionals, in anchoring, in defining and in time deixis. That is the machinery placing one provision in relation to another, so a text whose connectors come from the wrong inventory places its provisions in a way its readers do not recognize.
Two boundaries. A combination that a term anchors belongs to the term record, which already carries the Polish case where corpus frequency decides a connector against intuition; this record keeps the class and not that example. Where a connector sits inside a frame around a reference, the frame belongs to the record on frames and slots and the connector stays here.
Where the fixity comes from
Nothing prescribes a connector. It is attested, and what the attestation supports is narrower than it first looks.
- Biel finds complex prepositions frequent and hence cognitively salient in legislation, with a distribution higher than in general language and particularly so in Polish. The finding that matters downstream is comparative: national and EU legislation are profiled by different sets of salient prepositions, so interference may work against the readability of the EU text.
- Koźbiał reports the same shape for judgments. The high distribution against a balanced sample of general Polish is generic to the genre rather than a property of one court, and Court of Justice judgments differ from Supreme Court judgments in which prepositions are salient and in what they do.
- What this does not establish is a number anyone can carry. Both studies print their counts in tables, and this record gives none, because a figure belongs on a page only when the page it came from has been read. The distributions are the finding; the counts are apparatus.
Two further limits sit in the tradition itself. It admits a sequence as a unit only above a threshold someone chose, which the record on frequency and attestation takes up. And a profile drawn from one genre says nothing about another.
Consequences for translation
Nothing here is an error, which is exactly why it goes unrevised.
- The connector comes from the target genre's own inventory. Mapping the source connector onto its closest counterpart is what produces a text that is correct and reads as translated.
- Length is not preserved and is not meant to be. The same relation surfaces as a phrase in one version, a contraction in the next and a single adverb in the third, so a connector that shortens has lost nothing.
- Dropping the connector is available where the target resolves the relation by structure. That is a decision about the target version and should be taken as one.
- A reviser can flag a connector the target genre does not use, and can flag it only as unidiomatic. A count supports that and nothing stronger, and a claim built on one carries its genre and its direction with it or it is wrong.
Examples
EN>FR
- Source: the public documents referred to in that paragraph
- Target: les documents publics visés audit paragraphe
- Comment: Regulation (EU) 2016/1191, Article 8(1), English and French versions. French contracts the preposition with the demonstrative into audit, so five English words become two. A translator reaching for visés à ce paragraphe writes something the French version does not print.
EN>NL
- Source: the public documents referred to in that paragraph
- Target: de in dat lid bedoelde openbare documenten
- Comment: Same provision. Dutch keeps a demonstrative and a noun and moves the whole connector in front of what it modifies, so the relation is expressed at full length but in another position.
EN>DE
- Source: the public documents referred to in that paragraph
- Target: den dort genannten öffentlichen Urkunden
- Comment: Same provision once more. German replaces the whole anaphoric phrase with dort, a single adverb, and loses nothing a reader needs. The three target versions spread as far apart here as they converge on the definitional formula in the neighbouring record: connector length belongs to the version, not to the relation.
References
- Biel, Ł. (2015). "Phraseological profiles of legislative genres: complex prepositions as a special case of legal phrasemes in EU law and national law." Fachsprache 37(3-4), 139 to 160.
- Pontrandolfo, G. (2015). "Investigating judicial phraseology with COSPE: a contrastive corpus-based study." In C. Fantinuoli and F. Zanettin (eds), New directions in corpus-based translation studies, 137 to 160. Berlin: Language Science Press.
- Koźbiał, D. (2019). "Prepositions in EU and domestic judgments: a corpus analysis of the distribution and functions of simple, complex and secondary prepositions." Comparative Legilinguistics 35, 89 to 119. In Polish.
- Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 2016 on promoting the free movement of citizens by simplifying the requirements for presenting certain public documents in the European Union and amending Regulation (EU) No 1024/2012, Article 8(1), English, French, Dutch and German language versions.