Abstract
The article focuses on the main objective of an Interreg IIIB ‘Alpine Space’ project called Legal Language Harmonisation System for Environment and Spatial Planning within the Multilingual Alps (LexALP)1, which was carried out between 2005 and 2008 by an international partnership of public administrations, universities and research centres. The partnership answered the call for more terminological consistency and precision in the texts of the Alpine Convention and strived to analyse, compare and eventually reduce the legal and technical terminology used within those texts to a common denominator.
The article gives a brief overview of the Alpine Convention and the specific activity of terminology harmonisation in the legal field based on legal and terminological equivalence. It illustrates how such complex task was tackled within the LexALP project, describing the challenges faced with the help of concrete examples and what strategies may be followed when terminology harmonisation is not sufficient to bridge all conceptual differences between terms.