Abstract
The presentation will focus on the specificity of legal Czech in court decisions. Court decisions form an important part of law, they often fulfill the role of a model of court decision-making in a given area and can change the course or outcome of individual proceedings. Writing a court decision thus requires not only expert knowledge of the law and its functioning within the individual state and within the European Union, but also exact work with language, which is needed to achieve a uniform singular interpretation (Kořenský et al., 1999)
The decision of the European Court of Human Rights offers the greatest space for examining the specifics of the translation of legal Czech. The freely available source for their research are two databases - the Database of Selected Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (Justice, 2023) and the EUR-Lex database (EUR-Lex, 2023). The first mainly contains official translations of the Court's judgments issued in cases against the Czech Republic into the Czech language, the second includes official legal documents of the European Union, available in all national language mutations and enables mutual comparison of up to 24 official languages of the EU.
Legal texts have already become the subject of contrastive examination in the past, for example in the project Contrastive examination of factual texts (2002 - 2004), within the framework of a bilateral confrontation (in the sense of a foreign language versus a Czech text) it is possible to work with a mutual translation between languages or a translation from one common source ( Krcmová2022)
However, it is not always a matter of translation. Language versions are sometimes created simultaneously, other times with help in the field of translation of terminology from already existing language versions, we can also come across a compilation of documents in different languages. However, these are linguistic counterparts that have equal status and are subject to the same requirement of clarity and appropriateness (Nováková, 2019).
When translating, not only the functionality of the language used is evaluated, but other requirements resulting from the characteristic features of this stylistic unit must also be respected. In the past, court speeches belonged to the highest forms of rhetorical style, a high language style and a number of rhetorical figures were self-evident for them. However, the corresponding language level and specific rhetorical figures or tropes are still his own.