European Labour Law and its Challenges in Multilingual Terminology and Translation: A Case Study

The translation of legal texts has become a very important activity in our modern, international societies. Globalization has created a great need for multilingual versions of all kinds of legal texts. However, both law itself and legal language and terminology have a special characteristic: they are system-bound. Every country or autonomous region sets up its own legal system, and this has far-reaching consequences not only for the drawing up and especially the translation of legal texts, but also for comparative law and international and European law. In this article, we describe certain typical features of the terminology of labour law and expand on one particular term to show the problems in translation work. The multilingual character of European law, the need for translation and the specific wording of labour law texts in the individual member states lead to many translation problems and to legal insecurity for citizens. By analysing relevant terms in the transport sector, we discuss current research that compares concepts and terms in European, Polish, Dutch and Belgian labour law.