Equivalence in the Translation of Polish and Bulgarian Court Judgments: Terms from the Semantic Field of Polish kara and Bulgarian наказание

This paper explores Polish and Bulgarian terms related to the thematic field of the lexemes kara (Polish) and наказание (Bulgarian), both corresponding to the English term punishment. The study primarily focuses on the translatological aspects of these terms. The analysis is based on a corpus of texts compiled specifically for this research, which consists of several dozen criminal court judgments in each language. Particular attention is given to the issue of translational equivalence in practice. To this end, terms in the studied language pair are analysed by identifying their equivalents. Drawing on concrete examples of conceptual incompatibilities, the study outlines key translation techniques, including functional equivalence, descriptive translation, and the use of hyponymy and hypernymy.