Context is a notion that is commonly invoked in many linguistic studies, either with very general reference or, more specifically, in the light of one of a number of research approaches which assign distinct definitions to context, ranging from factors that can be recovered from a text, through social parameters serving as an index for the appropriation of discursive performance, to factors that bring texts into being and give them meaning. This exploratory and descriptive research

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... the notion of context specifically on the grounds of English/Polish translation of corporate documentation processed in company registration proceedings, touching upon factors that are presumed to be discursively relevant in this communicative situation. The study is conducted from the perspective of the sociocultural approach and it adopts the parallel corpus methodology. The author discusses the concept of context on the ground of legal communication and secondarily presents a corpus-based description of the context categories that are idiosyncratic and potentially discursively relevant for the said communicative situation in the cross-linguistic perspective. The contextual variation is tested for its capacity to affect translation performance. The results reveal specific tendencies as regards the distribution patterns in the values corresponding to the investigated context categories. They point to some divergencies in translation output caused by the source text variantivity and they pave the way and directions for further research. Already at this stage the findings may have significant pedagogical value and they constitute a solid starting point for sociolinguistic research on discourse variantivity. 1 Although the material analysed is declared specifically as company registration discourse with the implication of specific subject-and object-related context of the communicative situation in question it is assumed that other denominations related to the domain of commercial law are relevant here too. The distinction here is between the premodifier "commercial" and the adjectivally used noun "company" (cf. company law and commercial law) and between the various heads of the related nominal phrases (i.a. discourse, communication). Hence corporate discourse is a term that labels the discourse practices in the field of commercial law. Notably, this field of study is labelled with functionally alternative labels. A related term used in the literature of the subject is corporate communication, which is used interchangeably with it. Some scholars claim that corporate discourse is used more often in the academic environment [44] . Also, although the distinction is not clear, it emerges from some studies that the term corporate communication may have a wider reference range, for example, public relations documents, marketing communication [21: 222]. Bhatia [6] employs the adjective corporate as a component of a variety of related phrases (cf. corporate disclosure practices, discursive and corporate practices, corporate disclosure documents/genres, corporate communication). Kraakman et al. [33: 4], and Galdia [23] refer to corporate language.