The book is one of the few in-depth investigations into the nature of EU legal translation and its impact on national legal languages. It is also the first attempt to characterise EU Polish, a language of supranational law and a hybrid variant of legal Polish emerging via translation. The book applies Chesterman’s concept of textual fit, that is how translations differ from non-translations, to demonstrate empirically on large corpora how the Polish eurolect departs from the conventions of legal and general Polish both at the macrostructural and the microstructural level. The findings are juxtaposed with the pre-accession version of Polish law to track the «Europeanisation» of legal Polish – recent changes brought about by the unprecedented inflow of EU translations.

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Introduction
The language of Europe is translation.
Umberto Eco
Translation has been perceived both as an agent of regeneration and degener­
ation in the history of legal Polish. Since its early phases of development in the
Middle Ages, legal Polish has changed to a large extent through contacts, not
always voluntary and welcome, with other languages and legal systems — Latin,
German, Russian and most recently English. The latest evolution of Polish, an
Eastern European language spoken by about 40 million people, is connected with
two momentous events in the history of Poland: (i) the fall of Communism in 1989
and transition from a centrally-planned to market economy, and (ii) accession to the
European Union (EU) in 2004. As a result, in the last two decades the country has
experienced a tide of political, economic, social and cultural changes, facilitated by
an unprecedented transfer of know-how, via translation, from Western Europe and
Northern America.
This book addresses the second round of changes, resulting from Poland’s ac-
cession to the EU. The condition for EU membership was to translate Acquis, the
body of EU law, and harmonise national law with EU law. The harmonisation of
national law was based directly on translated law. EU-related legal translation, as
stressed by Lambert, goes beyond legal issues and has also social, cultural and
political implications: “It is (also) about identity, about entering a new world, first
of all in terms of discourse, then (later) in terms of rights and commitments” (2009:
91). Poland’s accession to the EU was, above all, symbolic in that it has restored a
sense of belonging to Europe and strengthened the European identity. Despite some
sceptical voices, 78% of Poles voted for EU membership in the 2003 referendum.
This project intends to answer the question whether the Polish of EU law, a
substantial portion of which is directly applicable in Poland, is different from the
language of national law and, if so, to what extent and how. For this purpose the
hypothesis was formulated that, despite the harmonisation, translated EU legisla-
tion differs from nontranslated Polish legislation due to two major groups of fac-
tors: (i) those related to the hybridity of EU discourse, its goals and institutional
norms of translating, and (ii) those related to distortions typical of the translation
process and source-language (SL) interference. To test the hypothesis, the follow-
ing research questions were formulated:

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(1) How does translated EU legislation differ from nontranslated national
legislation:
(a) globally as a genre (text-structuring and grammatical patterns)?
(b) locally at the microstructural level (term-embedding, term-forming and
lexical collocations)?
(2) Have the differences between translated and nontranslated legislation left an
imprint of Europeanisation on the post-accession Polish legislation (2011)
compared to its pre-accession version (1999)?
The corpus-based methodology was an obvious choice for the study due to its
potential to analyse and compare a large set of data and to uncover patterns of
language in an objective, reliable and systematic way. The analysis was conducted
with comparable corpora of Polish: (i) JRC-Acquis, a corpus of EU law from
which two subcorpora of regulations and directives were separated, and (ii) the
Polish Law Corpus built by the author as a reference corpus with a subcorpus
of codes and law-type statutes in their 2011 and corresponding 1999 versions to
study recent language change potentially induced by the avalanche of translated
EU law; (iii) the National Corpus of Polish used as a reference corpus to analyse
legal genre conventions against general Polish.
The choice of recurrent lexicogrammatical patterns for the analysis has been
dictated by a recent surge of interest in patterns awoken by corpus-based advances
in various branches of linguistics, translation studies, terminology and neighbour-
ing disciplines. The introduction of electronic corpora to language studies has
been compared to the introduction of telescopes in astronomy (Stubbs 2004: 107),
and one of the fundamental theoretical aspects that has been brought into focus is
the prefabrication of language. This study will investigate to what extent it is pos-
sible to recreate the natural patterning in legal translation, with reference to key
generic features of legislation.
EU translation is rarely researched within translation studies (cf. Koskinen
2008: 27). The present study is a pioneering project in that it addresses a number
of the hitherto neglected areas: EU translation, EU Polish (a eurolect) and its
impact on the language of national law. It offers a contribution to the ongoing
debate on EU translation from the perspective of a Slavonic language, which
is genetically different from Romance and Germanic languages. I reactivate
the concept of textual fit, operationalise and extend it to the analysis of trans-
lated EU law, and demonstrate its applications. The methodological objective
of the project is to test the potential of corpus-based methods to research legal
translation.

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This book appears in the series Studies in Language, Culture and Society
(edited by Anna Duszak, Andrzej Kątny and Piotr Ruszkiewicz). It reports on the
data-driven corpus-based research of intra-language variation and change brought
about by Poland’s accession to the EU, relating them to institutional, political
and procedural factors. Thus, it presents research on an institutionalised form of
mediated multilingual communication. The theoretical objective of the book is to
increase our understanding of EU translation, its properties and impact on national
law, while the applied objective is to improve the quality of EU translations and
training methods.
SYNOPSIS
The book is divided into two parts. Part I sets the theoretical ground for measur-
ing the textual fit and prepares an interdisciplinary conceptual framework for the
analysis by integrating knowledge from a number of fields, most notably corpus-
based translation studies, legal language studies, and EU translation, to account
for various contextual factors and constraints which operate during the transla-
tion process and affect the target text. Chapter 1 discusses the basic properties
of legal language, concentrating on its prefabrication and recurrent patterns that
are typical of legislation. Chapter 2 introduces EU translation as an independent
research field, analysing institutional drafting and translation processes and their
impact on the hybridity of the genre of EU legislation and national legislation.
Chapter 3 discusses the potential of corpus-based methodologies, their applica-
tions in translation studies and defines the parameter of textual fit as a linguistic
distance between translations and nontranslations in terms of overrepresented and
underrepresented lexicogrammatical patterns. Part II comprises an empirical study
into the textual fit of EU legislation translated into Polish against nontranslated
Polish legislation. First it describes the design of corpora and methodological
issues (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 analyses the textual fit at the macrostructural level
of key generic features, investigating grammatical and text-structuring patterns, in
particular as they reflect mental models of legal reasoning. Chapter 6 analyses the
textual fit at the microstructural level, examining term-embedding, term-forming
and lexical collocations. The findings are juxtaposed with the pre-accession ver-
sion of Polish law to see how the post-accession language changed and whether
some changes could have been facilitated by the over- and underrepresentation
of certain patterns in translated EU law. Chapter 7 contains a synthesis of the
results and their qualitative interpretation, final conclusions, limitations of the

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study, suggestions for further research and practical applications of the study in
translator practice and training. The findings of the study demonstrate that the
textual fit of EU law is divergent; translated EU law markedly departs from the
generic conventions of Polish law, invading its integrity and colonising the genre.
As a result, translated law creates a distinct, foreignising, more European variety
of Polish (a eurolect), which, in addition to being a product of efforts to ensure
a uniform interpretation and application of multilingual law, seems to be a by-
product of the unequal interaction between a majority and minority culture.