Acquis Communautaire as Supranational Legal Texts and their Interlingual Reproduction across Multilingual Europe

This conceptual paper examines EU institutional-legal texts as a rich repository of theoretical problems, using a synergy of linguistic and translatological approaches. The paper aims to promote awareness of EU supranational texts' complexities, drawing on the concepts of 'hybrid'/'reproduced'/'horizontal' texts resulting in 'language matrices'/'mirror images' in a multilingual communication in the EU. The paper suggests that EU texts take the form of 'self-translation' and interlingual imitation with broken expectancy norms of national recipients (including Slovaks) and require the source-oriented approach. Paradoxes conveying the workings of EU texts, their multilingual translation and supranational legal interpretation are also formulated.