gwarant

06:53 May 25, 2020 

Thank you all for the discussion.

17:30 May 24, 2020 

Thank you very much for the discussion, it's now a lot clearer to me what the pros and cons are of using the word "guarantor". I think the best thing to do in this case is to present the client with the options and ask them which they feel most comfortable with.

17:00 May 23, 2020 

Thanks, Mike!

09:06 May 23, 2020 

Art. 2. Odpowiedzialności karnej za przestępstwo skutkowe popełnione przez zaniechanie podlega ten tylko, na kim ciążył prawny, szczególny obowiązek zapobiegnięcia skutkowi.

Article 2. Penal liability for an offence with criminal consequences committed by omission shall be incurred only by a person who had borne a legal, special duty to prevent such a consequence.
https://www.proz.com/kudoz/polish-to-english/law-general/480...

Kodeks karny w art. 2 ustanawia szczególną zasadę odpowiedzialności karnej za przestępstwa skutkowe z zaniechania. Podmiotem takiego przestępstwa nie może być każdy, ale tylko osoba, którą obciąża szczególny prawny obowiązek zapobiegnięcia skutkowi. Osobę tę określa się mianem gwaranta.
http://www.sprawnik.pl/artykuly,10223,27340,odpowiedzialnosc...

18:55 May 22, 2020 

Yes, I quite enjoyed that. Thanks Frank and Leszek. We may have different approaches, but other people will benefit from our discussions to get to a more precise answer.

18:19 May 22, 2020 

@Leszek and Michale: It has been a great discussion. There is great merit to your points of view.

17:11 May 22, 2020 

You have a point. It is defined in the text, and guarantor would be the closest one-word equivalent. It would be easy to refer to it in the rest of the text.

However, as an outside person not having been exposed to the Polish concept gwarant before, it seems a bit odd to use the word guarantor in this particular context, which is why I suspect the asker presented his question. It's a question of sounding natural. I would venture to say that to most English-speakers' ears, the word guarantor would make them think of a person who voluntarily makes a guarantee that a particular obligation (usually a debt) would be met. The context in question refers to a situation where a person would be held liable for an offence committed by omission, which is a bit more general, but not too far off.

I think your option could work too. Language can be flexible, and words can be contextualized. It also depends on the client's preference. Personally, I think I'd still use the original term in italics and put in parentheses indicating that it refers to a person with a legal duty to act (as Frank suggested) or a person with a duty of care (https://bit.ly/36ljFCe).

16:49 May 22, 2020 

@Frank:
Thanks for the clarification. You're right, it is minutiae. And thanks for the dictionary link, it's really useful.

I agree that your option is perfectly valid. Just to be clear: I didn't want to insinuate that your option was wrong, but rather I applied my mental process on how I would approach the translation myself. :-)

I initially wanted to agree with your option, but then I went down a rabbit hole of researching the term and decided to write down what I thought.

To be fair, if you look at the translatica.pl definition of gwarant, it also doesn't have the particular definition of „Odpowiedzialności karnej za przestępstwo skutkowe popełnione przez zaniechanie podlega ten tylko na kim ciążył prawny, szczególny obowiązek zapobiegnięcia skutkowi”. However, from what I've found, there isn't a particular one-word reference to this party in English (unless we use and define it ourselves for the Polish context, sure). If it were me, I'd refer to the original word gwarant in italics and give an explanation of it, and thereafter continue using gwarant in italics. However, a client's preferences will of course have to be taken into account as well.

08:02 May 22, 2020 

IMHO I think that we should consider the purpose of the text and its translation - to provide information about Polish criminal law. That's why I opted for the term "guarantor"- not used in this context in English or Us criminal law. In fact the text provides the information that this is a person who is under duty to act and Polish criminal law refers to such person as guarantor. If the term "guarantor" is ommited in the translation the text would miss information on the term used in Polish criminal law doctrine.

23:21 May 21, 2020 

@Michael: we are thinking along the same lines when it comes to trying to explain the Polish legal concept in a manner understandable to an English speaker, using terms from Western jurisprudence. Our difference - the duty to act vs. the duty of care - gets us down into minutiae. The "duty of care" is invoked in cases of negligence (https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=599). The "legal duty to act" is a legal duty imposed statutorily or contractually (https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/duty-to-act.h... which agrees with the Polish definition - prawny, szczególny obowiązek zapobiegnięcia skutkowi.

22:02 May 21, 2020 

I'm afraid that, in this case, there isn't a one-word term in English that would accurately encapsulate the full meaning of the word gwarant as it is used in the context of Polish criminal law.

It would be ideal to have a one-word term to describe the concept here, but there isn't a precise one in English. In situations like this, you can either use the original term in the source language in italics and give an explanation in parentheses or you can simply use descriptive language only.

In the context of a legal document, however, in which terms can be defined in various ways in a glossary, then guarantor could work if you assign it the intended (non-dictionary) definition beforehand.

21:54 May 21, 2020 

It's interesting that they opted for the use of the word "warrant" later on to refer to a person. It seems they used an obsolete definition of "warrant" (from the word warraunt) namely:

"A defender, a protector."

The first sentence of the text that you quote actually describes the concept quite well, except in English-speaking countries they would refer more descriptively to a person with a duty of care (among other variations). There is an important difference in the meaning of guarantor, which is primarily used in other contexts.

We should also keep in mind that Polish articles are also translated by individuals who make their own decisions about how to translate a word, and no doubt many would opt to translate gwarant as the calque guarantor without a second thought. However, the further you delve into the subject, the less certain such a translation becomes...

My personal yardstick is always to think about what would communicate the meaning as clearly as possible. A reader seeing the word guarantor may have some other preconceived ideas of what it could mean, but "a person with a duty of care" is far easier understood.

11:34 May 21, 2020 

Here is a Polish source for the use of the word guarantor.
Damian Tokarczyk
GUARANTOR’S OBLIGATION IN CRIMINALLAW
Summary
The purpose of this paper is to present the duties of a person obliged to prevent the occurrence of a consequential harm in criminal law. The discussion on criminal liability for consequential crimes committed as a result of a failure to perform a specific legal duty usually focuses only on the broken chain of causation and omission to act, and the sources of the obligation to take an ac-tion. The author analyses the content of the warrant’s duties, or, in other words, what a warrant is obliged to do. The limits of the obligation depending on a specific situation which is to be prevented are also discussed, followed by a list of consequences for a failure to perform the duty or improper perfor-mance of the duty by a person obliged to prevent criminal consequences.
http://docplayer.pl/21445085-Obowiazek-gwaranta-w-prawie-kar...

Perhaps this will broaden the discussion.