What it is
Courts decide in fixed sentences. The lines that open a judgment, hand down the ruling and close the record are not composed for the case; they are the court's own wording, repeated from decision to decision with the case's particulars slotted in. The ruling line is performative kin: Trosborg, analysing statutes and contracts, gives the purest declaration as "I/we (hereby) declare" plus proposition, and the judgment's closing formula carries exactly that hereby.
The genre is the densest in this section, and measured so. Pontrandolfo's COSPE corpus holds 782 criminal judgments from Spain, Italy and England and Wales, six million words from 2005 to 2012, and admits a unit only at five occurrences per two million words in at least five judgments; on those terms the routine formulae cluster in five recurrent moves, from heading to operative part. Spanish judgments close on Así por esta nuestra Sentencia, lo pronunciamos, mandamos y firmamos, a triplet inside a performative, the kind binomials-and-doublets keeps.
The neighbour to hold apart is performative-and-enacting-formulae. There an instrument warrants the wording and the formula constitutes the act of a legal order; here the warrant is the deciding court's own practice, and the formula marks whose procedure is speaking.
Where the fixity comes from
No statute prescribes dit pour droit. What fixes the line is the practice of the court that writes it: the formula belongs to the institution, and for the wording to change, the institution's own drafting practice would have to change. The reach of that warrant is exact. It binds the texts of the court that keeps it, in every language version the institution issues; it binds nobody else. A national court, a drafter in another system, a translator rendering a foreign judgment for information: for them the same wording is somebody else's house practice, and a deviation is a preference, not a finding.
The evidence here is deliberately thin and says so: one judgment, C-649/23, read in three language versions, so nothing below claims invariance across chambers, formations or procedure types. The corpus backdrop is Pontrandolfo's: judicial prose runs on frozen patterns of a formulaic kind, and his English subcorpus carries a lower share of phraseological units than the Spanish and the Italian.
Consequences for translation
Two situations must not blur: producing or checking one of the deciding court's own language versions, and translating a judgment out of its system for a receiving audience.
- Inside the institution the formula is found, not made. The English version of a ruling prints the court's English line; a version is checked against the institution's model, not against the source, and composing there is a finding.
- Outside the institution the receiving system's own formula is a trap. A translated Spanish judgment closed with an English court's line tells the reader an English act took place: the formula does not translate the act, it relocates it. Parallel routines carry the running moves, facts and reasoning; at the line that performs the decision, the parallel routine names the wrong system.
- What remains is a rendering that is visibly not the receiving court's own: recognizable, glossed where needed, flagged where coined. The obligation this reference attaches to designations without a counterpart applies in full: a coined formula travels marked as a coinage, with a note carrying what the source line does.
- The chamber's capitals, First Chamber against première chambre, are notation, not wording: a conventions fact. A reviser logging it as a phraseology error claims the wrong warrant; the boundary between the sections runs exactly there.
Examples
FR>EN
- Source: Par ces motifs, la Cour (première chambre) dit pour droit :
- Target: On those grounds, the Court (First Chamber) hereby rules:
- Comment: C-649/23, 19 March 2026, the line opening the operative part, French and English versions. The court's practice fixes both. English inserts the explicit performative hereby where French runs on the fixed dit pour droit, which no compositional English reaches; French names the reasoning section, motifs, where English generalizes to grounds; and the chamber takes capitals in English and none in French, a conventions fact inside a phraseological pair.
EN>NL
- Source: must be interpreted as meaning that
- Target: moet aldus worden uitgelegd dat
- Comment: The same judgment, point 1 of the operative part, English and Dutch versions, directly after the provision cited (Article 2(a) of Directive 2001/29/EC; artikel 2, onder a), van richtlijn 2001/29/EG). The hinge of every ruling on interpretation. Dutch is fixed on aldus; a translator composing writes moet zo worden geïnterpreteerd dat, Dutch the versions do not print.
References
- Trosborg, A. (1991). "An analysis of legal speech acts in English Contract Law. 'It is hereby performed'." Hermes 6, 65 to 90, at p. 72.
- 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, at pp. 138, 144 and 150.
- Judgment of the Court of Justice (First Chamber) of 19 March 2026, Institutul G. Călinescu, C-649/23, the line opening the operative part and point 1 of the operative part, French, English and Dutch language versions.