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 has happened primarily through EU regulations and EU directives. However, the different types of EU acts have a different impact on national legal terminology. EU directives need to be implemented by the member states, while EU regulations are directly applicable. As a consequence, even after an EU directive has been implemented by each member state, there will still be differences between the legal systems concerning concepts and designations. EU regulations bring greater terminological harmonisation, but may lead to significant changes in concepts, designations and concept relations.
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 between the Italian and the German-speaking legal systems done at Eurac Research. Terminology research follows the principles of terminology work (Arntz, Picht & Schmitz 2014) and the approach of legal comparison (Sandrini 1996; Mayer 2000). The resulting terminological entries are published online in the Legal Information System bistro (http://bistro.eurac.edu).