Terminological Field Structure as а Reflection of Legal Institutions in English-Russian Legal Terminology

Abstract

Institutional asymmetry of legal terms is not uniform but graduated: the divergence between a term and its translation equivalent is located at different levels, from the status of an individual unit to the structure of an entire terminological field. The present study aims to demonstrate that the structure of a terminological field reproduces the structure of the legal institution it serves, determining the level at which the translation equivalent ceases to be reliable. Drawing on four illustrative cases arranged by an increasing degree of divergence – from the status of an institution (magistrate) through categorical classification (felony / misdemeanour) and the type of legal remedy (injunction) to the structure of the field (the English series of names for a legal practitioner against the single Russian advokat) – the article identifies a scale on which the function of a term and its equivalent may coincide, creating an illusion of equivalence, while the actual divergence lies in the institutional structure. The analysis combines dictionary, statutory, and corpus data (the British National Corpus) with authentic court judgments. Corpus data are used to independently verify dictionary and statutory observations by establishing absolute frequencies and building collocation profiles for the core terms. Based on the analysis, a typology of four levels of asymmetry is constructed. The practical value of the results is twofold: for translation, they indicate when a functional equivalent suffices and when an institutional note is required; for bilingual lexicography, they justify an institutional label marking the level of a term’s divergence from its equivalent. The proposed approach shifts the description from merely stating cross-systemic differences towards explaining their mechanism. Institutional asymmetry is thus described as an ordered, graduated phenomenon, offering the notion of correspondence between terminological fields and legal institutions as an effective tool for comparative terminology studies beyond the examined language pair.