COLLOCATIONS WITH A VERB AS A COLLOCATE IN THE LANGUAGE OF LAW

In this paper the authors explore collocations with a verb as a collocate in the German language of the legal profession, based on a corpus excerpted from the text of the current Bavarian Higher Education Act (BayHSchG). The aim of the paper is to determine the metaphorical character of this group of collocations and their morphosyntactic and semantic features in the German legal language and to compare them with their Croatian equivalents. The collected examples are explored using the methodology of qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to determine which (metaphorical) collocations and which verbs as collocates occur most frequently in a specific legal text and which morphosyntactic and semantic peculiarities they exhibit. Finally, the use of certain verbs as collocates in German and Croatian legal language is compared. The results confirm that metaphorical and idiomatic expressions are culturally determined and often have different morphosyntactic and semantic realizations in the two languages. Therefore, these constructs represent a challenge in translation. The results of the research contribute to the attempts at shedding light on the difficulties faced by Croatian lawyers, law students, court interpreters, and translators in understanding and translating metaphorical collocations with a verb as collocate.