INSTITUTIONAL TERMINOLOGY IN TRANSLATION: A CULTURAL-LINGUISTIC INTERFACE IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

This paper examines the challenges and strategies involved in translating institutionally bound terms across languages within the context of international institutional discourse.It highlights the importance of understanding the socio-political, legal, and cultural frameworks that shape these specialized lexical units, as they often reflect the structural and ideological foundations of national governance systems and rarely have direct equivalents in other languages.Emphasizing the translator's role as a cultural mediator, the study draws on contemporary translation theory and interdisciplinary research to explore adaptive, context-sensitive strategies, such as function-oriented descriptive translation, borrowing with explanatory apposition, and contextual adaptation, that ensure semantic precision and functional relevance.Strategic decisions must account for systemic (dis)equivalence between legal traditions, the communicative purpose of the text, and the institutional literacy of the target audience.Particular attention is given to the behaviour of institutional vocabulary within formal registers, which demand terminological consistency, pragmatic clarity, and genrespecific precision.Through comparative analysis of examples from Anglo-American and post-Soviet legal and administrative systems, the study demonstrates how cultural distance and divergent legal traditions necessitate informed, flexible translation solutions.Institutional terms are shown to mirror national ideologies and governance models, reinforcing the need for nuanced, culturally informed translation practices.The findings advocate for a systematic, interdisciplinary approach that combines linguistic proficiency with legal and cultural competence.This ensures accurate and transparent communication across multilingual professional environments, particularly when translating high-stakes documents such as treaties, policy statements, and international agreements.