Investigating Copyright Terminology and Collocations in Polish, English, Japanese and German

The article deals with the comparison of key terminology in the field of copyright in the Polish, English, Japanese and German languages. The research material consists of copyright acts binding in Poland, Great Britain, the United States of America, Japan and Germany. The terminology has been compared in order to reveal similarities and differences in the meaning. Firstly, statutory terms from the Polish, English (British and American), German and Japanese acts will be presented and discussed. Also, a list of functional equivalents (Polish, English, German and Japanese) will be presented. The task was to search for functional equivalents, and if there is partial equivalence or no equivalence, an equivalent was provided according to techniques of providing equivalents for non-equivalent terms (c.f. Kłos, Matulewska, Nowak-Korcz 2007). They were made in such a way that equivalents will correspond with the reality of the laws in the above mentioned languages. The terms have been extracted with the usage of AntConc (corpus linguistics software). The method of analysis of comparable texts has been applied as well as the one based on three categories of equivalence by Šarčević (1997): “near equivalence”, “partial equivalence” and “non-equivalence”. Special attention has been paid to system-bound terminology existing in those five legal systems. To sum up, it should be borne in mind that the copyright law has been unified almost world-wide. As a result many countries have adopted similar or almost identical principles in this respect. Therefore, there is a significant convergence of meanings of analysed copyright terms with only slight differences resulting from deeply ingrained local and national legal traditions.