Abstract
South Tyrol is an autonomous province in Northern Italy where the public authorities have to use two minority languages, German and Ladin, along with Italian, albeit to different degrees. This brings about the need to elaborate local German and Ladin legal terminologies to express Italian legal concepts. Terminology development efforts in South Tyrol promote terminology consistency in South Tyrolean German and also try to avoid an excessive regionalisation, so as to foster communication with the neighbouring German-speaking legal systems. Since 2002, terminology work done in the three languages is freely accessible in the online Information System for Legal Terminology bistro (http://bistro.eurac.edu) developed by Eurac Research. The data stock comprises various areas of law and is regularly refined and updated. This paper gives a brief overview of the history of terminology work in South Tyrol, explains the main aspects of the current terminology work done at the Institute for Applied Linguistics of Eurac Research, and then focusses on bistro. The latter has become an appreciated tool for the dissemination of legal terminology in South Tyrol for the two local minority languages and a growing support for communication between different legal systems. All this makes bistro also a noteworthy tool for other regions with comparable situations, for which it may represent a model.