Juridical Phraseology and topolectal variation

Abstract

Variation in the field of phraseology has been the object of numerous studies of the common language. Since the last decade of the 20th century several investigations stressed the relevance of the phraseological variation in texts for special purposes in many fields, as for instance for specialized translation. In this paper the phraseological variation in legal texts is treated from a topolectal point of view in a corpus consisting of sentences from Hispanic penal law. Firstly, the corpus is analyzed using the model introduced by Tabares Plasencia (2012). Secondly, a sample of variation in the analyzed texts is proposed in order to systematize this variation and to develop a database of PLU (Phraseological Legal Units) for this type of texts, applicable to other text types in the future, which is addressed to Spanish-German translators.