Terminological phraseology

What it is

A term rarely stands alone in running text. It arrives inside a combination: a verb that takes it as an object, a preposition that governs it, a doublet it forms with a near-synonym, a formula that opens or closes the passage it sits in. Terminological phraseology is the study of those combinations, and of which of them belong on a term record.

What marks the object off from general phraseology is not idiomaticity but the presence of a term. That is the feature the survey literature settles on, and the one point on which the schools converge. Past it the labels multiply, and they do not all have the same scope.

The boundary against the technique records is the one to hold. There, a translator reaches for a rendering, which is a decision. Here, the target community has already fixed which verb goes with which term. That fact is prior to the decision: the translator finds it rather than makes it, and can be wrong about it in a way a stylistic choice cannot. The other boundary is against the phraseology records, where extent decides: a combination anchored to a term stays here, and a unit that no single term anchors, such as a formula or a doublet that survives the removal of every term, is taken up there by unithood and extent, fixedness and the phraseological cline, and binomials and doublets.

Where the authorities stand

The field diagnoses itself as under-defined rather than divided, and the diagnosis is the finding: the notion has spread so widely that many writers use it without saying what they mean by it, which blocks comparison between studies.

Three disagreements are on the record. Some researchers refuse collocations the status of phraseology at all, because they are not idiomatic. Others divide over whether a combination has to contain a term to count. A third position holds that the line between a polylexemic terminological unit and a specialized phraseological unit cannot be drawn in principle. Underneath all three sits the observation that one denomination has a different reach depending on the theory adopted.

One distinction survives into practice: patterns that merely recur in legal text are not the same as patterns that carry legal effect. A complex preposition can be very frequent and carry no legal meaning of its own, while disposing of an appeal is the act itself rather than a description of it.

The standards are close to silent. ISO 704 in its 2022 edition carries no clause on phraseology, collocation or set phrases anywhere in its contents, and ISO 26162-1:2019 has nothing either. The exception is ISO 12616-1:2021, which places phrases among the text elements for the term field at clause 7.3.1, so a phrase has a documented home on a translation-oriented term record even though no standard in the family defines what one is.

Consequences for translation

• An unidiomatic combination is usually a conventions error and not a terminology error. The evaluation grid the European Commission's translation directorate applies to outsourced work has no phraseology category, so a wrong collocate falls under clarity, register and text-type conventions, and becomes a terminology error only where the combination is itself prescribed institutional usage.
• The reviser's licence is drawn in the same place: the directorate's quality guidelines instruct them to change what has to be changed and not what could be changed, and to keep corrections and suggestions apart.
• The verb is the part most often missing from the record and the part that carries the effect. A comparison of four bilingual legal dictionaries found that all four described combinations of noun with noun and noun with adjective, left verbs out, and said little about the jurisdiction a rendering belongs to.

Examples

EN>PL

• Source: without prejudice to
• Target: bez uszczerbku dla
• Comment: Corpus frequency decides, against intuition. In a study of legislative genres the Polish formula occurs three times per million words in national legislation and once per million in general Polish, against 266 in translated European Union directives. It is licensed by the drafting convention of one text type only, and in a domestic instrument it meets a reader who has not met it before.

ES>EN

• Source: visto para sentencia
• Target: the matter is now ready for judgment
• Comment: A marker in the source decides the case. A Spanish legal dictionary labels this rendering an approximation rather than an equivalent, because the Spanish procedural act has no counterpart in common law procedure. Two further bilingual dictionaries give two further renderings, and a comparison of the three found the heterogeneity itself a source of confusion.

FR>AR

• Source: Les conventions légalement formées tiennent lieu de loi à ceux qui les ont faites
• Target: العقد شريعة المتعاقدين
• Comment: The legal system decides, and here twice. The Arabic formula, transliterated al-'aqd shari'at al-muta'aqidin, stands in the civil codes of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Qatar and Syria, all drafted on the Napoleonic model, so the codal Arabic is itself derived from the French article by translation. Classical Islamic jurisprudence states the same rule with a wholly different phraseme, which makes the choice one of legal tradition rather than of wording.

References

• Tabares Plasencia, E. and Pérez Vigaray, J. M. (2007). "Fraseología terminológica: estado de la cuestión y ejemplo de análisis contrastivo." Revista de Filología 25, 567 to 577, at pp. 569 to 571.
• 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, tables 4 and 6.
• Buendía Castro, M. and Faber, P. (2015). "Phraseological units in English-Spanish legal dictionaries: a comparative study." Fachsprache 37(3-4), 161 to 175, at pp. 166 to 172.
• Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. and Pontrandolfo, G. (2015). "Legal phraseology today: corpus-based applications across legal languages and genres." Fachsprache 37(3-4), 130 to 138.
• Strandvik, I. (2017). "Evaluation of outsourced translations: state of play in the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation." In T. Svoboda, Ł. Biel and K. Łoboda (eds), Quality Aspects in Institutional Translation, 123 to 137. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Pontrandolfo, G. (2023). "The importance of being patterned: old and new perspectives on legal phraseology." In Ł. Biel and H. J. Kockaert (eds), Handbook of Terminology, Volume 3: Legal Terminology, 124 to 150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Halimi, S. (2021). "Arabic legal phraseology in positive law and jurisprudence: the historical influence of translation." Comparative Legilinguistics 46, 37 to 64.
• European Commission, Directorate-General for Translation (2015). DGT Translation Quality Guidelines, 26 November 2015.
• ISO 704:2022. Terminology work: Principles and methods, 4th edition. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization, contents.
• ISO 12616-1:2021. Terminology work in support of multilingual communication, Part 1: Fundamentals of translation-oriented terminography, 1st edition. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization, clause 7.3.1.
• ISO 26162-1:2019. Management of terminology resources: Terminology databases, Part 1: Design, 1st edition. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.