Untying the Gordian knot: interpreting extended term-forming patterns

Abstract: While it is true that phraseological units in legal discourse have received some attention in recent years, the fact remains that extended units of meaning (Sinclair 2004) have not been investigated sufficiently enough. This also applies to complex term-forming patterns (Biel 2014b), which “may be seen as frozen collocations due to their high structural stability” (Biel 2014b: 180). The paper thus examines extended term-forming patterns extracted from two comparable corpora of contracts by means of WordsmithTools 6.0 (Scott 2012) and accounts for their interpretation by consulting the extralinguistic context. The paper also attempts to propose a translation approach to such extended units of meaning, given the fact that some of their constituents are often specific either to a certain legal system or to an area other than law, thus calling for a complex interdisciplinary approach to the interpretation of such units. The paper may thus represent a useful resource for legal translator training since it reveals the patterning of terms in the genre of English and Croatian contracts.