A translatological and forensic-linguistic study of the English translation of the German Civil Code

Abstract

Since its promulgation in 1896, the German Civil Code, one of the most influential civil codes in the world, has been translated into English several times. Thanks to the Code’s jurisprudential quality, both its English translation and the translating process are of high value and offer various starting points for profound research. However, so far, there have been hardly any substantial studies of the Code’s English translation, neither from the comparative legal or forensic linguistic perspective nor from other angles. This paper attempts to make a substantive, interdisciplinary – i.e., forensic linguistic – content-related, and jurisprudential study of the Code’s English translation to address this research lacuna. To that end, it focuses on two aspects of the statute law’s provisions, i.e., respectively from the lexical and syntactic perspective.