Over the past decade, the influence of translations of EUR-Lex legal douments on the original and translated Lithuanian administrative legal language had an impact on the decision of linguists and translation researchers to study the changing administrative Lithuanian language. The research object of this article is relative clauses which are specific to the French legal texts and which complement the subject content of the main sentence. In this article, the author examines the content of the above-mentioned relative clauses from the point of view of French interpretive translation theory and methodology. The author has an aim to identify the peculiarities of the use of relative clauses in French version of the opinions of the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and to describe translation solutions of the relative clauses into Lithuanian as well as genre characteristics of the translated texts. The study of the Advocate General’s opinions in the multilingual database of EUR-Lex documents reveals frequency of the relative clauses and peculiarities of their linking to the main sentence in the French legal texts. The results of the research reveal the new tendencies of the use of relative clauses in the administrative language different from those described in the scientific literature. The research of the translation of these sentences into Lithuanian indicated the frequency of translation solutions, the differential features of the translated legal language and the importance of translator's cognitive experience in the interpretation process of the content.

Contemporary translation theory defines translated text as a complex semantic whole, which in one way or another expresses linguistic, historical and political context of the receiving culture. Translation is not isolated but reflects cultural experience and is interrelated with other texts and discourses. According to the theoretical translation position, most problems in translation arise not from linguistic units in the text or the differences between linguistic meanings but from the transfer of cultural and stylistic meanings from one cultural system to another. As a result of this position, intertextual units are chosen to be the object of this article. The aim of the present research is to analyse the general tendencies of the translation of intertextual units from Lithuanian into French and to determine the problems of the cultural transfer of intertextual units in the translations of literary texts during the period from 1990 to 2016. In this research, the author relies on the interpretative theory of translation that explains translation as a cultural transfer.

This article presents an analysis of the reasons and the specificities of the development of translation theory in one of the three post-Soviet Baltic countries, Lithuania, since the first half of the 20thcentury until 1990. The analysis considers the historical and political circumstances characterising the period of Lithuania’s Independence (1918–1940) as well as the Soviet period (1940–1941 and 1944–1990). The discussion of the development of translation theory in Lithuania helps reveal general features relevant to the context of translation studies in Latvia and Estonia as well, because the historical and political experiences of these Baltic countries have been similar to those of Lithuania.