No abstract

Legal concepts are generally deeply rooted in a specific legal system. Even when two legal systems use the same official language, such as Germany and Austria, the system-boundness of their legal concepts may lead to communication problems. German is also an officially recognised minority language in South Tyrol, Italy. In South Tyrol, the local public authorities must use the minority language in their relations with German-speaking citizens. This brought about the need to elaborate a local German legal terminology to express Italian legal concepts. Terminology development efforts intended to promote terminology consistency and avoid an excessive regionalisation of South Tyrolean German, so as to foster communication with the neighbouring German-speaking legal systems. In the last decades, European Union law has led to a growing harmonisation in the legal terminologies of its Member States, facilitating communication between the different legal systems, also with benefits for terminology work in South Tyrol. This paper focuses on how European legal acts impact on national legal terminology and affect German legal terminology in South Tyrol. The considerations set out are based on comparative legal terminology work regarding the Italian and the German-speaking legal systems done at Eurac Research.

Developing terminology products as tools for organizing and transferring specialized knowledge requires careful considerations already during the planning stage. The main content of this paper is a checklist, which is the result of reflections gathered during the reprogramming and restyling of the Information System for Legal Terminology bistro (http://bistro.eurac.edu). bistro is an application used to publish the data contained in a multilingual terminological data base. The checklist is designed as a starting point and reference for the conception and structuring of terminology tools, e. g. online terminology reference tools. Its aim is to help identify needs and, at the same time, to guide developers in the basic choices to be made already in the planning stage.