Abstract
In South Tyrol, Italy, German is a co-official minority language next to the national language Italian. In this paper we show that the terminology pertaining to the domain of occupational health and safety (OHS) in this local-only minority language is not fully developed yet. We give examples of terminological gaps, excessive term variation and insufficient dissemination of OHS terminology in South Tyrolean German. We then describe the terminology development methods that are applied in South Tyrol to counter this situation, which may serve as a reference for other local-only minority languages. Given the interdisciplinary nature of OHS, we deal with both system-bound legal terminology and generally universal terminology pertaining to other domains, such as medicine, engineering, chemistry etc. This calls for different approaches: the terminology belonging to most domains is normally shared across the German-speaking area and should be used also in South Tyrol. However, legal terminology is always linked to a specific legal sytem. Therefore, it is necessary to first apply legal comparative methods to determine which terms from foreign German-speaking legal systems may be used also in South Tyrol, where the Italian legal system applies.