s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

English-Polish language contact in the translation of EU law 123
tools). According to this approach, legal texts belong to the group of texts that
entail a relatively low level of creativity. The next point worth mentioning is
that present day law texts are often times hybrid texts, that is they constitute a mixture
of legal systems: “A legal text, be it a source or a target text in the translation
process, can be rooted in a national legal system, but can also be rotted in
a regional or international legal framework” (Sandrini 2006: 117). According to
Peter Sandrini (2006: 117), law constitutes three major info-spheres such as
local (national legal systems that are nation and culture bound), regional on
international level (EU legislation) and global on transnational level (the UN
legislation).
A translator has a wide range of strategies at his or her disposal. Most
scholars identify two major translation strategies: a direct translation and an
oblique translation. A direct translation embraces three techniques (Munday
2001; Kielar 1988; Varo and Hughes 2002; Hrehovčik 2006): borrowing, calque
and literal translation. An oblique translation includes transposition, modulation,
equivalence and adaptation. Apart from the techniques just mentioned,
others list compensation, paraphrase, simplification, translator’s notes, and
transliteration (Hrehovčik 2006: 46–48).
4. Translating EU law – basic considerations
As far as the classification of the sources of the EU law is concerned, it
depends on the body that issues the law (the sources of law formed by Member
States and the institutions of EU; that is unilateral and bilateral acts), the medium
(written or spoken) and the legal status (binding acts such as regulations,
directives, decisions or non-binding acts such as recommendations or opinions).
Further, EU legislation may be divided into sui generis acts of no specific legal
status (some are legally binding and some are not) such as resolutions, declarations,
explanations, communications, reports, memoranda, schedules and “soft
law” embracing non-binding law, in other words, the law that is formally not
binding but of practical application. Generally, the sources of EU law fall into
primary and secondary sources of law, the former being treaties, the acts issued
by Council of the European Union, European Council and general rules of law
and the latter being the acts and agreements issued by EU institutions or Member
States. When it comes to primary sources of law, all treaties are classified
into “founding treaties” and “accession treaties” (Biernat 2006) or into “founding
treaties” (traktaty ustanawiające podstawę Unii), “revision treaties” (traktaty
rewizyjne) and “accession treaties” (traktaty akcesyjne) (Barcz 2011). After
the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon two treaties: the Treaty on European
Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union of 2010 constitute
the legal basis of the EU (cf. Barcz 2011).