Equivalence of contemporary English and Polish legal texts with reference to selected documents of the European Union

Abstract

The presents article offers an analysis of selected issues concerning the equivalence of legal documents of the European Union written in English and Polish, on various levels of text organisation: orthographic (the spelling of proper names); syntactic (the preference for synthetic or analytic constructions, the use of auxiliary verbs, etc.); semantic (equivalence of modal predicates, general names, legal terms) and rhetorical (models of legislative discourse). It also discusses the problem of interference from the English-Ianguage original on the Polish version of many legislative documents of the EU. The linguistic material analysed here comes from the following documents: Consolidated Version of the Treaty Establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (Official Journal of the European Union C 84/1/2010); Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Official Journal of European Union C83/2/2010); Consolidated version of the Treaty Establishing the European Union (Official Journal of the European Communities C325/2002; The Constitution of the Republic of Poland (Dziennik Ustaw nr 78/1997).