Legal translation and legal survivals

This study explores the relevance of the concept of legal survivals, proposed by the legal scholar Rafał Mańko, for legal translation purposes. The concept of legal survivals, in parallel to the well-known notion of legal transplants, problematises a specific aspect of legal continuity, namely the continued existence of certain units of legal culture despite transformations of a given jurisdiction’s legal system. Translating texts relating to such institutions raises difficult questions for legal translators, who need to consider the legal and/or terminological changes to establish acceptable equivalents. This article uses the translational comparative legal analysis framework to investigate the usefulness of Mańko’s theory for legal translation through three case studies of the Polish–English translation of property law terms. The research shows that the legal survivals theory may be useful in helping translators better comprehend the not-always-parallel paths of legal terminology and legal institutions and encouraging a kind of ‘legal genealogy’.