Legal translation and legal survivals: The Polish–English translation of post‑communist property law terms aided by comparative law

Przemysław Kusik
University of the National Education Commission, Kraków

This study explores the relevance of the concept of legal survivals, proposed by the legal scholar Rafał Mańko, for legal translation purposes. The concept of legal survivals, in parallel to the well-known notion of legal transplants, problematises a specific aspect of legal continuity, namely the continued existence of certain units of legal culture despite transformations of a given jurisdiction’s legal system. Translating texts relating to such institutions raises difficult questions for legal translators, who need to consider the legal and/or terminological changes to establish acceptable equivalents. This article uses the translational comparative legal analysis framework to investigate the usefulness of Mańko’s theory for legal translation through three case studies of the Polish–English translation of property law terms. The research shows that the legal survivals theory may be useful in helping translators better comprehend the not-always-parallel paths of legal terminology and legal institutions and encouraging a kind of ‘legal genealogy’.

Publication history

Date received: 7 May 2024

Date accepted: 25 July 2026

Published online: 21 August 2026

Table of contents

Half a century ago, the first edition of Alan Watson’s (1974) seminal book entitled Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law was published, marking the symbolic beginning of a new field of enquiry in comparative law, which has since grown far beyond Watson’s original exposition (Cairns 2013, 638–639; Graziadei 2019, 443–444). With his book, Watson opened up a novel perspective, seeking to demonstrate that most legal change actually results from the circulation of legal rules across the boundaries of legal systems (Mańko 2013a, 1; 2024, 93). The phenomenon of legal transplants is defined as “a transfer of the normative content in its legal form constituting functional entirety, having considerable load of normative novelty, or a transfer of a new method of legal regulation, not yet present in a legal system, from one system of law (foreign) to another one (host)” (Król 2010, 10). Put more simply, the concept of legal transplant refers to the phenomena of legal solutions being transferred between different legal systems. The legal transplant theory can be described as one of the central paradigms in comparative law (Graziadei 2019, 443; Kusik 2024b). Indeed, identifying a certain legal transfer as a legal transplant can let one “gain access to the set of analytical tools developed by legal transplant theorists” in order to “better understand the implications of legal transplants” (Gillman 2009, 301).

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