LEXICAL FEATURES OF COMPREHENSIVE TRAVEL INSURANCE CONTRACTS: PRE-TRANSLATION ANALYSIS

Abstract

The article is devoted to identifying and describing the lexical features of comprehensive travel insurance contracts (CTICs) as a component of pre-translation analysis in the Ukrainian–English language pair. The obligation to obtain travel insurance for international trips, particularly to Schengen countries, as well as the necessity of translating insurance contracts for travelers outside Ukraine, underlines the importance of accuracy and clarity in such documents.The theoretical framework of the study is based on the provisions of the Civil Code of Ukraine and the Law of Ukraine “On Insurance,” which allows CTICs and their appendices to be classified as legal documents. In such texts, any terminological unit acquires legal significance in the event of disputes between the insurer and the insured. The research material includes terminology and legal definitions found in CTICs and their appendices published on the official websites of the insurance companies Oranta, Persha, and Universalna. The article presents a typology of terms and legal definitions functioning within CTICs and their appendices. Through structural, semantic, and pragmatic analysis, it is established that field-specific terms account for 94.8% of the CTIC terminological system. These include medical, tourism-related, insurance, legal, technical, and financial-economic terms. The predominance of medical and tourism-related vocabulary is explained by the nature of insurance coverage, which primarily involves protecting travelers' health during active holidays abroad. Special attention is paid to legal definitions as a means of semantic clarification of field-specific terms. Based on F. Bennion’s classification, five types of definitions were identified: exclusionary (31%), clarifying (26%), enlarging (16%), comprehensive (16%), and labelling (11%). The most frequent in the corpus were exclusionary and clarifying definitions (57%), whose pragmatic function is to narrow the semantic scope of terms and ensure their unambiguous interpretation, thus avoiding legal ambiguity and facilitating effective claims settlement. Referential definitions were not found, likely due to the need for self-contained legal interpretation within insurance texts. The findings confirm the central role of specialized terminology and well-structured definitions in CTICs, contributing to their unambiguous interpretation.At the stage of pre-translation analysis, it is essential to identify an inventory of field-specific terms, focus on definitions that narrow or clarify their meaning, and check for established equivalents in international insurance or legal practice to ensure high-quality translation. Prospects for further research include exploring the grammatical features of CTIC texts in the context of translation.