7.1 Trzaskawka
Paula Trzaskawka. (2017). Investigating Trademark Terminology and Collocations in Polish, English, Japanese and German. International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse 7(1), 19-32.
Abstract: The paper deals with the comparison of key terminology in the field of trademark law in the Polish, English, Japanese and German languages. The terminology has been compared in order to reveal similarities and differences in the meaning. The author has extracted the terms from the main acts regulating the field in force in Poland, Great Britain, the United States of America, Japan and Germany that is to say: Polish Industrial Property Act, British Trade Marks Act, American Trademark Act, Japanese Trademark Act and German Trade Mark Protection Law.
The terms have been extracted with the usage of AntConc (corpus linguistics software). The method used in this paper is based on the three categories of equivalence by Šarčević (1997). Moreover, the author has resorted to linguistic, systemic, teleological and contextual legal interpretation (also called construction) of legal texts. Special attention has been paid to system-bound terminology existing in those five legal systems.
The techniques of providing equivalents for non-equivalent or partially-equivalent terms have been used to suggest possible methods of translation within those languages. The conclusions are that as a result of trademark law unification at the international level and the reception of almost world-wide principles in this respect there is a significant convergence of meanings of analyzed terms with slight differences resulting from following deeply ingrained local and national legal traditions.
Keywords: trademark law, legal terminology, collocations, comparative analysis
Category: 2017 Journals, Volume 7
