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Multilingual Corpus for Terminology Work: The LexALP Corpus of Legal Texts
and analysis, i.e. it serves to search for terms, defi nitions and contexts to be fed into the
terminology database. Next to facilitating the search for terminological data, the use of real
world language data is strongly advocated by modern approaches in terminology, which do not
consider the concept as a static and absolute entity outside the real world any more, but rather
always analyse it embedded in its linguistic context. Hence, the real meaning of a concept (and
therefore of the term which is used to refer to it) is determined by the words that accompany
it in real life texts (Chiocchetti & Ralli: to be published).
2.1 Text selection criteria
A corpus is defi ned as “a large collection of authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic
form according to specifi c criteria” (Bowker & Pearson 2002: 9). Special care was taken when
determining the criteria of text selection, since “[t]he quality of the resulting terminology
depends on the quality of the underlying corpus” (Gamper & Stock 1998/1999: 150). To best
conform to the needs of terminology work in the context of the LexALP project, the criteria for
the selection of corpus documents were jointly determined by legal experts and terminologists.
This work was driven by the following principles:
• entire documents only
Single paragraphs or excerpts taken from more ample texts are not added separately to the
corpus, in order to guarantee completeness and relevance of the selected texts.
• strong relevance to the subjects of spatial planning and sustainable development
Legal texts only marginally touching the selected subject fi elds are not included, in order
to keep both legal and terminological relevance and correctness at the highest possible
standard.
• primary sources of the law for each legal system
For every system at national and supranational level (see section 1) only normative texts
are collected (laws, codes etc.). Again this guarantees sound quality of the texts and
terminology. It also ensures their legal relevance and, on these grounds, their possible
terminological impact on future legislation in the subject fi elds under analysis.
• coverage of all offi cial languages of the Alpine Convention
For documents of the three supranational frameworks (EU law, international law and the
Alpine Convention framework) as well as for texts of the Swiss legal system, all language
versions for German, French, Italian and Slovene are included, if present.
• latest amendments and versions of all legislation
The corpus is meant to be a synchronic corpus and picture the state of legislation at time of
collection (June – August 2005) 8 . In some legal systems very old texts are still in force and
therefore are integrated into the corpus. Their presence within the corpus is justifi ed by
their legal relevance and the impact they still have on the current legal terminology.
• terminological relevance
Legally relevant legislation containing only lists of numbers, place names etc. are excluded
from selection by the legal experts, both due to the lack of relevant terminology and the
desire not to burden the corpus with data of limited use.
8 Future updates with new texts entering into force is generally possible but not foreseen at the current state of
work.
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