Abstract
On the example of subsidised housing in South Tyrol (Italy), this contribution illustrates the interconnection between systematic and text-oriented terminology work in the legal domain. In South Tyrol, German has the same official status as Italian. Therefore, a systematic terminology work has been crucial to express the Italian legal system unambiguously and coherently also in German. In the past, an extensive terminology was collected in different legal subdomains (e.g. administrative law) and partially standardised by a Terminology Commission. However, to provide the various provincial departments with more practical assistance in drafting and translating legal and administrative texts, recent terminology work in South Tyrol has often become text-oriented, i.e. based on selected legal texts for term extraction.
Subsidised housing shows that, despite the systematic structure of the legal domain, legal texts are often inherently transversal. Pertinent terms belong to different legal subdomains, such as law of obligations (e.g. canone di locazione [rent]) or family law (e.g. nucleo familiare [nuclear family]). This raises questions on delimitation of the subject field and on term selection. Although terms like abuso di alcol [alcohol abuse] are not directly related to subsidised housing, they appear in legislation, e.g. as restriction for specific subsidies. Further doubts concern termhood and domain specificity, e.g. whether persona anziana [elderly person] can be considered a (legal) term to be included in a termbase with legal terminology.
These factors require intensive consultation with field experts to ensure correct selection and clustering of relevant terms. They also concern the publication of terminology. In South Tyrol, terminological entries are published via the Information System bistro, where the respective legal subdomain is indicated for each term. However, as shown in the case of subsidised housing, another kind of representation may be necessary, to allow users to search for all pertinent terms for a specific subject field, which may cover more than one (legal) domain. In this sense, the shift from purely systematic to text-oriented terminology work shows that – especially in multilingual contexts where writing and translation-oriented terminology is essential for clear communication – it can be challenging to strike a balance between the need to cover the entire concept system of a legal subdomain and the practical need of stakeholders.