THE SPECIFIC FEATURES OF TRANSLATING THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS JUDGMENTS INTO UKRAINIAN

Abstract

The article has presented an attempt to determine the compositional, lexical and grammatical, as well as stylistic features of translating into the Ukrainian language the European Court of Human Rights judgments and decisions, based on the body of authentic translations. In the course of European integration process one cannot but admit the active cooperation of Ukrainian citizens with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The current situation entails a need in professional court translating and interpreting. The article comes up with a version of typical composition and content analysis in terms of the European court judgments and decisions. It seems necessary to underline the basic features of court discourse texts: application the markers of social distance in speech; increased formality of texts and speeches; interactivity of communication; the usage of the language within the framework of the official patterns, regulations; primarily informative aim of communication.

As far as the stylistic and linguistic facets of the ECHR judgments are concerned, it seems necessary to point out that this official document has a clear-cut structure including an introductory, descriptive, motivational and operative parts separated from one another by appropriate headlines. Each of them presents the contents of a judgment in a declarative, affirmative, argumentative or imperative manner. That can be achieved by such means of the Ukrainian language as official clichés and grammatical patterns, complex syntactic constructions, avoiding the ambiguity in describing the events. Furthermore, it was figured out that the style of court judgments can be preserved by proper translating the bookish lexicon, for instance, the archaic adverbs and grammatical forms, the constantly used passive voice of verbs, and the whole spectrum of modal verbs. The ways of adequate rendering of specific terms, proper names, and genre clichés have been described in detail. They include: finding a variant equivalent in the TL, literal translation with possible subsequent explanation or description, transcoding, in particular, adaptive, descriptive translation, addition, omission of words. In order to summarize the research findings within the framework of judicial terminology translation, the most efficient ways of rendering the Latin lexical units in have been proposed as well.