Suomalaisten ja venäläisten lakitermien osittaisen vastaavuuden oikeudelliset ja kielelliset ulottuvuudet

Abstract

Currently, there is a large demand for community interpreting and authorised translation in the language pair Finnish–Russian. One of the prerequisites for effective and responsible cross-cultural communication in the legal and administrative domains is precise and clear terminology. However, the legal systems in Finland and Russia are very different, just like the Finnish and Russian languages. As a result, finding adequate equivalents of legal terms is a challenging task. In this article, we examine various aspects of partial equivalence between Finnish and Russian legal terms from both legal and linguistic points of view. We use LATTER, a Finnish-Russian term bank of legal terms, developed by our team at Tampere University, as the primary data source for our research. One of our observations is that a strictly concept-oriented approach prevailing in normative terminology work is insufficient in the legal do-main. On the one hand, partial equivalents may in certain contexts function as adequate equivalents. On the other hand, some terms which refer to the same logical concept, can not be used as equivalents because they differ in other aspects, such as additional components of the meaning, connotations, register, or paradigmatic characteristics. On the basis of our analysis, we propose a number of changes to the classification of terminological equivalents and terminographic conventions and practices.