Corpus Linguistics for EU Legal Translation

The chapter aims at showing the usefulness of corpus linguistics for legal translation, reflecting on the advantages of using corpora to translate EU legal texts and providing readers with resources that can be used while working with institutional legal texts. The chapter is divided into two main sections: a theoretical part, aimed at presenting the basic concepts of corpus linguistics and the types of legal corpora with a special focus on EU legal texts, and a practical part in which examples of EU legal translation-driven corpus queries are presented and explained. The study presents the opportunities provided by EU legal corpora, exemplifying the types of corpus queries that can be carried out, from the traditional extraction of terminological and phraseological units to the study of parallel discursive conventions. It finally demonstrates the importance of corpora as tools for the 'discursive socialisation' of legal translators, who need to adhere to specific discursive conventions of the target genres.