Intralingual translation of legislative texts into everyday language and understandable law for laypersons

Abstract

Legal terminology and the use of legal terminology can be studied in a number of contexts: we can analyse the specificities of the language used by lawyers, the differences between legal language and the vernacular/everyday language, compare the written and spoken versions of legal language, describe the layers of legal language, the specificities of legal terms, discuss legal philosophy, legal pragmatics, legal semantics, and many other aspects of the law and language trend. These aspects of analysis are also closely linked to the field of legal linguistics, the main task of which is to examine the criteria of legal professionalism, linguistic sophistication and intelligibility in light of the need for consistency. In the following, I will use examples from the 2024 issues of the newsletter "Understandable Law – Effortlessly about Law" to show how the original text of the legislation differs from the legal explanation produced by the authors of the newsletter in layman's terms. The colloquial explanation of legislative texts is done without Latin expressions and legal terms, using simple sentences, which is a special case of intralingual translation, i.e. translation from Hungarian into Hungarian. The aim of the research presented in this paper is to carry out a comparative intralingual translation analysis of legislative texts and their colloquial interpretation in newsletters, and to identify the intralingual translation operations that contribute to text simplification and clarity.