Contrastive analysis (French-Spanish) of textual conventions and linguistic features of car insurance policies

Abstract

EU law imposes an obligation to insure motor vehicles, which entails the signing of an insurance contract, car policy insurance, that establishes rights and obligations of the insured persons. This policy must be written in an understandable language that both contracting parties may understand. This necessarily implies a suitable translation, which requires the translator to know both the textual conventions and the theoretical structure of the genre. In this paper, we present the results of a descriptive-comparative analysis of several French and Spanish car insurance policies. Our main objective is to provide scholars and professional translators with the knowledge of the genre conventions that govern this type of policies as well as its language peculiarities. The obtained findings show the differences and commonalties found in general and in particular conditions, modalities and services provided as well as relevant morphosyntactic and lexical characteristics of these textual documents in both languages. A significant selection of examples taken from French and Spanish texts supports our study.