Tereza Afonso
The European Union (EU) is a supranational and intergovernmental organization that develops policies and enacts legislation for 27 Member States. Since its inception, which dates back to the 1950s, multilingualism has reflected the EU’s unique approach to fostering cultural and linguistic acceptance while pursuing common economic, political, and social objectives. Equality of all 24 official languages and respect for linguistic diversity—embodied in the motto «United in Diversity»—it’s proven to be a compromise between the idyllic and the pragmatic. To ensure the smooth functioning of EU institutions, procedural languages are reduced to English, followed by French and, to a lesser degree, by German. In this context, translation is key to facilitating communication, easing interinstitutional negotiations, unveiling interdependencies, and contributing to the reconciliation of multiple legal cultures. Known as Eurolects, foreignizing varieties of national legal languages have emerged. Despite the set-up of a Eurolect Observatory and other relevant research activities, according to our knowledge, there are no studies concerning the EU variant of Portuguese. Considering English and French Eurolects as source languages and bearing in mind the EU role in the introduction of new concepts and distinctive terminology, we have compiled a parallel corpus composed of 78 regulations drawn up between 1993-2019 in the domain of waste management. Regulations are directly applicable and binding in their entirety upon all Member States, natural and legal persons. Environmental law is a dynamic, multidisciplinary, young branch of law, which aims to tackle present-day problems. Based on a five-step hierarchy, waste management promotes waste prevention, reuse, recycling, recovery, and disposal. This sets the starting point for describing the pragmatic, semantic, and lexico-grammatical characteristics of eventive specialized phraseological units (SPU) in waste management regulations translated from the main working languages into Portuguese, and studying the phenomena derived from the contact of language systems at the supranational level.
Keywords: European Union, Regulations, Eurolects, Waste Management, Eventive SPUs, English, French, Portuguese.