In search of a Portuguese Eurolect: Building a comparable corpus for intercultural research

• Autores: Tereza Afonso
• Localización: Fòrum de Recerca, ISSN-e 1139-5486, Nº. 26, 2021 (Ejemplar dedicado a: XXVI Jornades de Foment de la Investigació en Ciències Humanes i Socials), págs. 61-61
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of Eurolects. These foreignising varieties of national legal languages have emerged within the European Union as an outcome of a translator-mediated communication in a supranational multilingual environment strongly dominated by English as a procedural language, followed by French. The interaction between EU culture and minority cultures, and the degree of interference national legal languages have been experiencing is worthy of research efforts. Pursuing economic growth, social cohesion, and legal integration, by agreement of the Member States, the EU is responsible for the introduction of new concepts, a distinctive terminology intended to be harmonious in the 24 official languages of the EU, and a use of language that feels different to national audiences.

    Despite the establishment of a Eurolect Observatory and relevant research activities to address this phenomenon, our research is the first attempt to study the Eurolect concerning the Portuguese language. In order to assess to which extent Portuguese Eurolect trickles down into national legislative Portuguese, a descriptive and empirical study on phraseology will be conducted. For this purpose, a domain-specific comparable corpus was compiled, composed of EU texts (versions of Directives in Portuguese), transposition acts into the Portuguese legal order, and unrelated Portuguese legislation on environmental law. Directives require Member States to achieve objectives and implement the measures into their national law systems. As a primary version of the Portuguese Eurolect, directives are in a unique position to generate points of comparison with the equivalent legislative instruments set out at the national level as a means of transposition into the Portuguese legal order. This paper will give an account of the steps taken to compile this corpus, providing a methodology that can be useful for social sciences researchers.