REALIZATION OF THE CATEGORY OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN LAW TEXTS (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN LANGUAGES)

Abstract

Ensuring high-quality translation of legal texts in the fields of international and comparative law is one of the challenges of the modern legal society. This task is conditioned by the expansion of international relations and the prospects of Ukraine’s accession to the EU. This determines the relevance of our study, which aims at analyzing the functioning of the category of intertextuality in the original texts and translations of laws and legislative acts of the EU and Ukraine. It is concluded that the category of intertextuality is a basic category in the process of textual communication in the field of international and comparative law. This article examines the means of realizing the category of intertextuality at the explicit level of legal texts in Ukrainian and English. Direct quotations from other laws and references to the texts of laws in the margin, which were used to interpret medieval laws, are no longer a means of explanation widely used in modern laws. The refusal to use this tool serves to ensure text compression. Quoting and referencing other texts to the extent that they do has only been possible in the last two decades, thanks to the technical possibility of hyperlinking. The function of hyperlinks is especially important for texts of translations of legal acts and laws, as they provide an interpretation of documents and make a significant contribution to their understanding. One of the most common means of implementing the category of intertextuality in legal texts is internal references, i.e. references to an article or clause of a given law, in addition. The use of hyperlinks makes the entire modern process of scientific research an intertext, which in turn makes it possible to understand the language of comparative law. The means of implementing the category of intertextuality provide a kind of dialogue between the original text and the translation text. The text of the law in the original language, the text of the translation and the interpretation of the text of the law by the recipient create a single intertext. The means of implementing the category of intertextuality, in turn, ensure the effectiveness of interpretation and understanding of the texts of laws.