The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is an international court set up in 1959 with the aim of ruling on applications alleging violations of the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court’s official languages are English and French, which are also used for delivering and publishing its judgments. In order to decide on the single cases, the ECtHR needs to discuss and recall national and international legislation. This leaves “traces” in the Court’s judgments. The focus of this paper is on one possible type of such traces, i.e. loan words referring to Italian legal concepts and institutions. The paper presents a case study conducted on a corpus of ECtHR judgments published in English. The aims are to propose a methodology for the semi-automatic extraction of loan words and to analyse them in the light of translation techniques.

The paper examines the possible usage of event templates derived from Frame-Based Terminology (Faber et al. 2005, 2006, 2007) as an aid to the extraction and management of legal terminology embedded in the multi-level legal system of the European Union. The method proposed here, which combines semi-automatic term extraction and a simplified event template containing six categories, is applied to an English corpus of EU texts focusing on victims of crime and their rights. Such a combination allows for the extraction of category-relevant terminological units and additional information, which can then be used for populating a terminological knowledge base organised on the basis of the same event template, but which also employs additional classification criteria to account for the multidimensionality encountered in the corpus

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The inclusion of specialised corpora in terminological studies since the early 1990s has allowed for the observation and description of the behaviour of terminology in authentic linguistic contexts. As a result, what is nowadays known as “Textual Terminology” (Bourigault & Slodzian 1999, Pour une terminologie textuelle.

Due to the ever-changing legal landscape of the European Union, the terminology used in EU documents is subject to constant formal and conceptual evolution. In this paper, a bilingual (Italian and English) corpus of equally authentic EU legal texts covering a time span of fifteen years (1998-2012) and concerning the legal area of victims of crime is analysed from a diachronic perspective. The aim is to discuss the terminological changes observed in the corpus in the light of the classification of evolution phenomena proposed by Tartier (2003) and Picton (2011). In order to examine both formal and conceptual terminological evolution, the distinction between genotypes and phenotypes introduced by Sacco (1991) is applied to the terms identified in the corpus and the underlying concepts. The analysis of the EU corpus shows that the three categories proposed by Tartier (appearance, disappearance and stability) and the first three (novelty and obsolescence, implantation of terms and concepts, and centrality) of the four categories proposed by Picton for the terminology of space technologies also apply to the terms of the examined legal area.