Classification and translation of selected Polish contractual agreements/contracts under the law of obligations into German

Abstract

The aim of the article is to provide translators who deal with legal texts with a list of parallel legal institutions pertaining to contractual agreements in Polish and German. A list of Polish contracts under the law of obligations and their German counterparts has been compiled on the basis of current regulations in both countries. The focus of analysis are the contractual agreements enumerated in and regulated by the Polish Civil Code. They can be divided into two groups: the former consists of the agreements which have exact counterparts in the German Civil Code (BGB) as contracts under the law of obligations and whose translation equivalents can be easily found, while the other comprises of eleven types of contractual agreements which do not have exact counterparts in the regulations of German civil law. Consequently, they can pose problems in the translation process since equivalents can be difficult to find for a translator who lacks specialist knowledge of law. Such a translator is then dependent on specialist dictionaries and lexicons, which do provide equivalents of the terms searched for, but which do not always take into consideration the reality of a different legal system. Among the eleven problematic contracts five are regulated as sub-types of different contracts and may not be found under the names offered as direct translations in the German Civil Code. Regulations pertinent to three other contracts are to be found in the German Commercial Code and one contract in the group in question is even regulated in a separate act of law. The analysis reveals that every Polish contract under the law of obligations has its counterpart in the German legal system. In order to produce an adequate and equivalent translation of a given text into German, the translator needs to have specialist knowledge of a particular field besides that of specialist vocabulary.