Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Multilingual Corpus for Terminology Work:
The LexALP Corpus of Legal Texts
Elena Chiocchetti & Verena Lyding, European Academy of Bozen-Bolzano,
elena.chiocchetti@eurac.edu, verena.lyding@eurac.edu
Abstract
This paper describes preliminary considerations and concrete work on a multilingual corpus, which is being
built within a project aiming at the harmonisation of the spatial planning and sustainable development
terminology used within the Alpine Convention. As it serves to support legal terminology work, the corpus
is composed of legal documents of six Alpine countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and
Switzerland) in the four offi cial languages of the Convention (French, German, Italian and Slovene). Some
corpus documents are available in three or four language versions. In fact, next to the Swiss legal texts,
also relevant EU legislation, international law, and Alpine Convention documents are part of the corpus.
These texts can ease the retrieval of translation equivalents in the other languages.
In this paper the criteria for text selection and classifi cation of documents, as well as decisions on
corpus architecture and interface design are explained. All aspects are presented with reference to the
special designation of the corpus: quadrlingual terminology work for harmonisation purposes.
1. Introduction
Supranational communication among the Alpine states may be hampered due to two main
factors: on the one hand, the countries of the Alpine arc use four distinct offi cial languages
(French, German, Italian and Slovene), on the other hand, there are traditional differences
between the national legal systems, even between states using the same offi cial language
such as Germany and Austria. For example, whereas the German law distinguishes between
streng geschützte Arten and besonders geschützte Arten, the Austrian Land of Steiermark
makes a different distinction between vollkommen geschützte Tiere and teilweise geschützte
Tiere 1 . In short, while German legislation establishes different degrees of protection for a
number of species, in Steiermark the law names a few animal species which are exempt from
full protection in specifi c periods or circumstances and thus rather separates “fully protected
animals” from “partly protected animals”.
Each legal system is deeply rooted in the history of a country and in the language that
expresses it, even more so, if we consider that the law does not use the language, it is made
of language 2 (Cortelazzo 1997: 36). Furthermore, legal terminology is often not consistent,
neither between legal systems using the same language 3 , nor within the same system 4 . This
1 For more detailed information on the spatial planning and sustainable development terms described in this paper,
such as defi nitions, equivalents in other languages etc., please refer to the terminology database within the LexALP
Information system at http://www.eurac.edu/lexalp.
2 “[I]l diritto non si serve della lingua, ma è fatto di lingua.” (Cortelazzo 1997: 36)
3 See for instance, the EU term chien drogue, which corresponds to the French national term chien renifl eur. The use
of this term at Europen level is possibly due to the similarity to its equivalents in other languages (English drug dog,
German Drogenhund, Italian cane antidroga etc.)
4 In Slovenia a “non-indigenous animal species” can be referred to either with the term alohtona živalska vrsta or with
the term tujerodna živalska vrsta. For another example see the terms used to designate the culprit of a crime in
Italian penal law: reo, soggetto attivo del reato, agente or colpevole (http://www.eurac.edu/bistro).
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