Latinisms in Supranational and National Lawmaking: A Contrastive Study of EU Directives and Polish Transposition Measures

This article investigates the mediation strategies through which Latinisms occurring in EU legal discourse are handled in Polish legislation under divergent supranational and national legislative drafting guidelines. Drawing on a comparable corpus of Polish transposition measures (statutes and regulations) and corresponding EU directives, the study combines corpus analysis with an examination of legislative drafting guidelines to examine three mediation strategies: omission, retention, and translation. The study also analyses whether Latin-derived terms and expressions occur in national legal acts without corresponding occurrences in the EU directives. Corpus evidence indicates that Latinisms occurring in EU directives are predominantly omitted in the Polish transposition measures, while retention and translation occur only occasionally. However, Latinisms do form part of domestic legislative practice, occurring both in transposition measures and in other national legal acts, despite legislative drafting guidelines discouraging the use of foreign expressions or borrowings. A limited number of Latinisms found in the national legal acts have no corresponding occurrences in the EU directives. The study indicates that the transposition of EU law constitutes a form of institutional linguistic mediation along the supranational–national axis, in which competing drafting conventions shape the linguistic realisation of legal meaning, rather than simply entailing the direct transfer of lexical forms.