The English corpus-base translation of Italian neutral legal multi-words

Legal multi-words are formulaic expressions mentioned in legal discourse. As with legal translation, translating legal formulae is challenging since equivalent expressions must be found at language and legal system level. Nonetheless, amongst the various legal multi-words, there are some referred to as “neutral” which are used irrespective of the genre, subject-matter, mode (written or spoken), and legal system of reference. The literature has put little focus on the corpus- based translation of such formulae and this paper wishes to bridge this gap. Therefore, it aims at consulting ad hoc corpora to source acceptable English equivalents of Italian neutral (i.e., non- technical) legal multi-words such as prepositional phrases, adverbial phrases, adjectival phrases and verb phrases. For this purpose, two sets of comparable corpora are analysed: Italian and English terms of service (ToS, Author in press), and the Italian and English sections of the BoLC (Bononia Legal Corpus, Rossini Favretti et al., focusing on statutory and judiciary documents). The paper findings reveal the highly reliability of the corpora, which produce equivalent formulae at both word and phrase level. When full equivalence is not possible, the corpora help retrieve acceptable (i.e., functional) translations. These results partly confute the literature's argumentation on the reduced formulaicity of some legal target texts (Mauranen), at least as far as neutral formulae are concerned.