Terminological Variation and Legal Interpretation in Turkish Translations of Medical Malpractice Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights- A Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract

In this study, the consistency of legal terminology in the Turkish translations of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) medical malpractice judgments is examined, and the impact of terminological variation on legal interpretation is evaluated. ECHR judgment in the field of healthcare are widely relied upon by national judicial authorities rendering the accurate and consistent translation of legal terminology essential for preserving legal meaning. Analysis of medical malpractice judgements available in the European Court of Human Rights Case-Law Database (HUDOC) indicates that key legal concepts such as negligence, fault, obligation, liability and responsibility are translated into Turkish using more than one equivalent which may lead to conceptual ambiguity and differences in interpretation. A comparative corpus analysis of eight ECHR medical malpractice judgments and their Turkish translations (2015-2025), using Voyant Tools, examines term frequency, contextual patterns and translational variation. Terminological choices were evaluated within the framework of Relevance Theory and Toury’s theory of translation norms. The findings of the study indicate that terminological standardisation is high in the English texts of the ECHR judgments, whereas in the Turkish, the same conceptual domain is distributed across multiple terminological variants. The study contributes to the fields of legal translation and comparative legal linguistics by demonstrating the importance of terminological consistency in the translation of ECHR judgments.