Dziewiętnastowieczne tłumaczenia Kodeksu Napoleona wobec tradycji polskiej terminologii prawnej
The 19th-century translations of the Napoleonic Code and the history of Polish legal terminology

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the persistence of Polish legal terminology in the context of the legalchanges that were introduced in the first half of the 19th c. after the Napoleonic Code hadbecome public law in the Duchy of Warsaw. The presented research covers vocabularyrelated to three thematic fields: CARE, FAMILY and DIVORCE. The study comparesthe lexis that is associated with these areas and that can be found in the NapoleonicCode with the terms that had been used in Polish law until the end of the 18th century.The study, which focuses on the sameness of the terms rather than their referents,shows a large number of persistent legal terms: 44% of the terms used in the translationsof the Napoleonic Code had been present in the Polish legal terminology earlier. It alsoindicates that the 19th-century translation of French law, which significantly differedfrom the legal tradition of the Commonwealth of Poland, was largely based on the alreadyused terminology. Finally, the study shows that the translator used traditional syntheticterms when referring to basic legal concepts. The new terms, by contrast, include mostlymulti-word equivalents of more complex legal concepts.

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