Abstract

Legal language is notorious for its formulaicity, perceived by outsiders as a vice (petrification, lack of spontaneity) while by insiders as a virtue (standardization). Formulaicity institutionalizes the discourse by limiting drafters’ creativity and idiosyncrasy. It is to a large degree created and strengthened by phraseology—fixed recurrent patterns at the textual, grammatical, and collocational level. Little research has been conducted to investigate how phraseology behaves in legal translation and whether translation is able to retain the same level of formulaicity. The aim of this chapter is to fill in this gap by providing a conceptual framework based on the existing literature and by exploring translated legal phraseology against the background of nontranslated law in an empirical corpus-based study.