What it is
Two languages do not carve up meaning the same way, and Zgusta gave the fact its name. Anisomorphism is the difference in how designata are organized in individual languages, and his warning is the part usually forgotten: it is not confined to culture-bound words but has to be expected in the lexicon generally, which is why absolute equivalents are infrequent.
For terminology the working consequence is that a term pair is not a symmetric relation. The mapping is commonly many to one in one direction and one to many in the other, so that a translator going one way has a decision to make and a translator coming back does not. Which target concept is meant is then settled by the domain of the running text, not by the term.
Duběda names this directly. Direction-asymmetric equivalence is equivalence that does not obey the one-to-one principle and that usually makes the translator's decision-making harder in one direction than in the other. His reasons come in three families: semantic, where synonymy and polysemy do the damage; systemic, where system-specific terms and competing legal systems do; and social, where the difficulty is that translation into a second language is not the same task as translation into a first.
Where the authorities stand
The phenomenon is descriptive: nobody prescribes it and nobody disputes it. What is worth reporting is how large the effect is when someone counts.
Biel counted. Working on Polish company-law terminology, she found that spółka akcyjna alone has as many as sixteen English equivalents across her reference base of nine works, six bilingual dictionaries and three published translations of the Polish commercial companies code. That figure is the best single argument in this part of the reference for not trusting a dictionary equivalent on sight. It also disposes of the idea that variation of this kind is noise: sixteen renderings in nine considered sources is a structural property of the pair.
Biel adds a complication that is underappreciated outside legal translation. The choice is not only between languages. One source term can force a choice among target legal systems that share a single language, so that the same Polish term becomes a public company limited by shares for a United Kingdom client, a publicly-held corporation for a United States one, and a public limited liability company in European Union contexts. The target language is fixed and the target system is not, and nothing in the source designation tells the translator which is wanted.
Chromá approaches the same asymmetry through synonymy and polysemy rather than direction, and supplies the resolution mechanism: premodifiers in the running text are what let a translator disambiguate a term with several legal senses. That answer points at the document rather than at the term base.
Consequences for translation
- A term record is directional. An entry that records a pair without recording which way it was validated will be read backwards sooner or later, and the reverse reading is often wrong.
- Generalization and particularization are the techniques this fact forces, and they are not reversible. What is discarded going one way cannot be recovered coming back.
- Where a source term has several target candidates, the discriminating evidence is in the document. Modifiers and the instrument the term appears in resolve the choice; a longer candidate list does not.
- One target language can mean several target systems. For English above all, establish which jurisdiction the reader is in before choosing.
Examples
PL>EN
- Source: spółka akcyjna
- Target: public company limited by shares / publicly-held corporation / public limited liability company
- Comment: Biel's pluricentric case, and the reason the entry is not simply a list. The three renderings are not competing guesses at one target concept; they belong to three legal systems that share English, and the correct one depends on which system the text will be read in. Alongside them she documents sixteen attested equivalents across nine reference works.
EN>FR
- Source: jurisprudence
- Target: jurisprudence
- Comment: Two to one in one direction and one to two in the other. Cao notes that English jurisprudence carries two basic senses, the philosophy of law and case law, while French jurisprudence and Italian giurisprudenza refer only to case law. Going into French the translator must decide which sense is present; coming back there is no decision to make, only a trap, since the French term will not carry the philosophical sense the English form suggests.
EN>CS
- Source: disposition
- Target: nakládání / pořízení
- Comment: Chromá's worked case of a one-to-many mapping resolved by the document. English disposition covers the act of transferring something to another's possession, a court's final settlement of a case, and a provision in a statute. Czech splits the first two, and what tells the translator which is meant is the premodifier in front of the term.
References
- Zgusta, L. (1971). Manual of Lexicography. Prague: Academia and The Hague: Mouton, at pp. 294, 296 and 316.
- Biel, Ł. (2006). "Incongruity of Company Law Terms: Categorization of Polish Business Entities and their English Equivalents." Translation Journal 10(4).
- Biel, Ł. (2023). "Variation of legal terms in monolingual and multilingual contexts: Types, distribution, attitudes and causes." In Ł. Biel and H. J. Kockaert (eds), Handbook of Terminology, Volume 3: Legal Terminology, 90 to 123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Chromá, M. (2011). "Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural Translation." Research in Language 9(1), 31 to 50, at pp. 47 to 48.
- Duběda, T. (2021). "Direction-Asymmetric Equivalence in Legal Translation." Comparative Legilinguistics 47, 57 to 72, at pp. 57 and 68 to 69.
- Cao, D. (2007). "Legal Terminological Issues in Translation." Ch. 4 of Translating Law, 53 to 73. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, at pp. 56 to 57.