Explicitation as a means of rendering legal terminology in the English–Ukrainian translation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights.

Keywords: formation of a terminological system, grammatical explicitation, legal term, lexical explicitation, lexico-grammatical explicitation, translation

Abstract

The article highlights the problem of English-Ukrainian translation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The aim of the article is to identify the role of explicitation in achieving communicatively effective English-Ukrainian translation of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The objectives of the article include clarifying the concept of explicitation as a translation solution and identifying and describing the types of explicitation in the analyzed English-Ukrainian translation. The object of the analysis is explicitation as a method of rendering the meaning of an original English-language legal term in Ukrainian, while the subject presupposes identifying the types of explicitation in the English-Ukrainian translation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The material for the analysis consists of examples of explicitation in the English-Ukrainian translation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The novelty of the study lies in the systematic analysis of explicitation as a manifestation of the expansion of the grammatical structure of a legal term in translation, which indicates the instability and ongoing formation of the terminological system of the target language. As a result of the study, three types of explicitation are distinguished: lexical (replacement of a hyperonym with a hyponym), lexico-grammatical (distribution of the meaning of one structural unit among several units and the addition of new units), and grammatical (division of sentences and expansion or elevation of the status of a phrase to the level of a subordinate clause). The obtained data prove that the structural organization of the current state of Ukrainian legal terminological system is a dynamic indicator of its gradual transition from the phase of formation to the stage of maturity – from the expansion of grammatical structure and polysemy, characteristic of the current stage, to structural equivalence and terminological stability. Such development is required for the successful harmonization of Ukrainian legislation with international standards and for the formation of a self-sufficient, stable legal language system. Prospects for further research are seen in the use of corpus linguistics tools to verify the proposed assumptions.

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Author Biographies

Alla Martynyuk , Professor at Mykola Lukash Translation Studies Department of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

Doctor of Philology, Professor

Violetta Mirgorod

first-year postgraduate student at Mykola Lukash Translation Studies Department of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

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Published
2026-05-29
How to Cite
Martynyuk , A., & Mirgorod , V. (2026). Explicitation as a means of rendering legal terminology in the English–Ukrainian translation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights . The Journal of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Series: Foreign Philology. Methods of Foreign Language Teaching, (103), 153-158. https://doi.org/10.26565/2786-5312-2026-103-18