On Semantic Pleonasms and Their Translation in Institutional Register

Abstract

Institutional register should be highly accurate and ambiguity-free; however, it is mainly complex and hard to understand. One of its characteristic linguistic features is the use of set expressions and clichés. A number of pleonasms are also clichés, frequent in different documents. These pleonastic phrases make the text unnecessarily dense and redundant. For the most part perhaps, wordiness is also typical of the translated documents. Institutional translators most often follow particular guides concerning style, lexis, etc. The focus in institutional translation is on the authenticity of the text, which results in further complexity of the translated variant. The article focuses on semantic pleonasms used in the documents of the European Union. An assumption is made that institutional translators are influenced by the original structure of pleonastic phrases (and possibly by translation guidelines) and render them in the target language as pleonasms, too. Thus, the major concern of the study is to analyse semantic pleonasms in the English and Lithuanian versions of the documents of the European Union and to determine whether there is high prevalence of pleonasms in institutional register as represented by EU documents on the Eur-lex database.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.21.1995