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

Elena Chiocchetti, Verena Lyding
is especially the case when texts are translated and subsequently negotiated, as it happens
within the Alpine Convention 5 : here synonymy, polysemy and ad hoc-neology are particularly
frequent and diminish effi ciency and immediateness of communication. For example, the
Alpine Convention uses two terms to designate a “distribution atlas” in Italian, atlante di
diffusione and atlante di distribuzione. If we compare it with the terminology used at national
level, we notice that Italian law only uses the second term, which suggests that the neologism
atlante di diffusione should be avoided within the Alpine Convention texts, as it may foster
misunderstandings and probably originated in an imprecise translation 6 .
To address all these problems, the terminology on spatial planning and sustainable
development used within and around the Alpine Convention shall be harmonised by an
international group of experts, the Harmonising Group. This group will analyse the contrastive
terminology work, previously carried out by terminologists and legal experts, covering six nations
of the Alpine arc, namely Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland, and three
supranational legal frameworks (EU law, International law and within the latter, the particular
framework of the Alpine Convention). The Harmonising Group are in charge of defi ning a set of
four translation equivalents for each concept analysed (one term for each language and one-toone
correspondence between equivalents) to be used within the Alpine Convention, thus trying
to eliminate translation mistakes or unnecessary and confusing synonyms. At the same time,
the risk of misunderstanding Alpine Convention terms shall be kept to a minimum: this is the
reason why harmonisation will base itself on an accurate preparatory contrastive terminology
work done for all legal systems involved, to make sure that the Alpine Convention terms adhere
as much as possible to the national terminology in this fi eld whenever possible and desirable.
The corpus described in the present paper is being built in the frame of a more ample
Interreg IIIB project called LexALP, i.e. Legal Language Harmonisation System for Environment
and Spatial Planning within the Multilingual Alps, aiming specifi cally at this harmonisation of
the terminology used by the Alpine Convention in its four offi cial languages. The corpus serves as
a source of specialised terminology, legal defi nitions and linguistic contexts for the contrastive
terminological analyses, which are stored in a terminology database 7 . Corpus, terminology
database and other modules are part of an integrated system, the LexALP Information System.
All modules are publicly available under the address http://www.eurac.edu/lexalp. The
fi nished LexALP corpus will thus soon provide a free online resource of legal language texts in
four languages.
2. Corpus design
The purpose of the corpus is to support terminology work prior to the activity of the Harmonising
Group in all four project languages and for all legal systems involved. By implementing a
corpus we provide large amounts of relevant language data (texts) and make them easily
accessible and searchable via a common interface. The corpus is used for terminology retrieval
5 The Alpine Convention is a framework agreement for the protection and sustainable development of the Alpine region.
It was signed in Salzburg (Austria) by Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the EU on 7 th
November 1991. Slovenia signed the convention two years later and Monaco became a party on the basis of a separate
additional protocol. The Convention entered into force on 6 th March 1995. (http://www.alpenkonvention.org/page1_
en.htm).
6 For other examples refer also Sérasset et al.: to be published.
7 The terminology database is based on the Papillon model (http://www.papillon-dictionary.org/Home.po).
506
Multilingualism.indb 506 4-12-2006 12:30:18