The Academic and Parliamentary Dimensions of the EU Acquis Linguistic Analysis in Training Institutional Translators in Ukraine

The EU English governs the language style in developing the legislative acts on the EU integration track in Ukrainian institutions. The formation of the Ukrainian version of Eurolect, commonly known as a special code, is decisive for the compatibility and interoperability of the Ukrainian law-making system with the EU acquis and runs parallel to pre-accession negotiations and relevant screening procedures. A challenge to be met is adhering to the stylistic language parameters of the EU texts by translators and legal experts to strengthen the institutions’ translation capacities for a smooth accession process. The study aims to raise awareness of Eurolect in the academic and parliamentary domains to enhance the competencies of institutional translators, linguists, and legal experts. The literature review and observation methods used in the fieldwork at the Association4U (Project) (Paliichuk 2021) predetermine the question of strict vigilance over the consistency of legal discourse. The results help turn legal experts’ attention to the concepts of “hybrid texts”, "template-like nature”, “reproducibility”, and “horizontality” (Bednárová-Gibová, 2016) as manifested across the lexicological, graphological, morphological, semasiological, grammatical, and syntactical features considering the functional purpose of an EU legal act. The academic dimension embraces the collaboration between the Project and Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University (BGKU), during which teachers and students were trained in EU Law and Translation; the introduction of EU translation into Stylistics of the English language to train translators for Ukrainian institutions; release of the chapter on Grammatical and Stylistic Issues of Translating EU Legal Acts (Paliichuk et al. 2024) in the Manual on EU Legal Translation into Ukrainian. The parliamentary domain includes developing style guides for comparative legal analysis of EU acts across pre-accession chapters. For this, the EU Stylistics manual is being drafted by a team of BGKU teachers and experts from parliamentary services. The study's conclusions point to the admittance of the Translation—Languages—Teaching trichotomy as a working model to meet the academic and parliamentary needs for drafting new laws in line with the EU acquis and preparing institutional translators capable of dealing with linguistic challenges within the bulk of national regulatory acts across operative sectoral legislation.