L’interferenza nelle sentenze in spagnolo e italiano della Corte di giustizia dell’Unione europea: un caso di studio

This paper aims at investigating Toury’s law of interference, which posits that translations tend to under-represent target language features and to over-represent source language ones, by means of corpus-based empirical study. More specifically, it aims at testing the influence of French, the working language of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), on the Spanish and Italian versions of the CJEU judgments. The analysis, carried out by comparing parallel corpora of judgments delivered by the CJEU (CSCG) and comparable corpora of non-translated texts issued by national judges (COSPE), provides an example of positive and negative transfer, namely the explicitation of the subject and the different frequency of use of complex prepositions. The results seem to confirm both instances of interference. As far as the positive transfer is concerned, since French is a non-pro-dop language – unlike Spanish and Italian –, more explicit subjects are actually found in European judgments. The differences in the frequency of phraseological patterns are seen as negative transfer: court translators tend to use complex prepositions resembling French ones rather than those traditionally used in national judgments. This paper yields interesting results which confirm the law of interference and suggest further investigation on the overlapping of different translation universals detected in CJEU judgments.