In Quest of Sufficient Equivalence. Polish and English Insolvency Terminology in Translation. a Comparative Study

The paper deals with the problem of translating selected insolvency terminology from Polish into English and from English into Polish. The re- search corpora encompassed the Insolvency Act 1986 (England and Wales) as amended and Ustawa z dnia 28 lutego 2003. Prawo upadłościowe i naprawcze [the Act on Polish Insolvency and Rehabilitation Law of 28th February 2003 as amended]. The research methods included: (i) the comparison of parallel texts, (ii) the method of axiomatisation of the legal linguistic reality, (iii) the termino- logical analysis of the corpus material, (iv) the concept of adjusting the target text to the communicative needs and requirements of the community of recipients and (v) the techniques of providing equivalents for non-equivalent terminology. The research hypothesis has been so formulated that the parametrisation of legal reality may assist in finding more adequate equivalents and determine differences in meaning of compared source and target language terms, which in turn facilitates the choice of a more adequate technique of providing equivalents for non-equivalent or partially equivalent legal terminology meeting the com- municative needs of translation recipients. The research results revealed that insolvency terminology is highly system-bound and available equivalents may often be misleading for the community of target text recipients