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The article aims at outlining the specific problems connected with the elaboration of legal and administrative terminology in a lesser used language and illustrating the methods and tools proposed considering the knowledge and competences to be conveyed. Since 2003 the Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism of the European Academy of Bolzano (EURAC) offers education courses in legal terminology work, coupled with introductions in related/complementary disciplines, e.g. documentation, specialised translation and technical writing. Next to professional trainings, the Institute held also ad-hoc courses, such as a two-day course organised in 2008 for the Mòcheni, a Germanic minority living in the Italian Province of Trento. Since the passing of provincial law no. 6/2008, which foresees specific measures for the protection and promotion of local language minorities, the Mòcheno-speaking community has the right to use their language in all situations of social, economic and administrative life in both oral and written communications. Notwithstanding the recent compilation of a standard grammar, the Mòcheno language is not yet developed for the use in technical and specialised contexts. Indeed, the most urgent needs seem to exist in the translation of administrative terminology.

South Tyrol is a part of Northern Italy where a large German-speaking minority lives. In 1972 the local population was granted the right to use the minority language with the public administration, in court and in all realms of public life (DPR 672/1972). An urgent need for a clear and consistent German legal language that faithfully reflected the Italian legal system ensued. The task of responding to such terminological emergency was assigned to a commission of six legal experts and translators (DPR574/1988), who were to officially validate (i.e. standardise) the German language equivalents to the existing legal and administrative Italian terms. The use of the newly standardised terminology is mandatory for all public bodies. After about 20 years of activity, the proposed paper aims at analysing the results obtained and difficulties faced by the Commission during their daunting task of creating a German language terminology to express the concepts of Italian law with a constant view to the neighbouring well-established German speaking legal systems. The paper will illustrate the decision-making process, term selection criteria and strategies of neologyas well as discuss the procedural problems and terminological inconsistencies on the basis of real examples.

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.

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