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Handbook of Terminology: Volume 3. Legal Terminology
Edited by Łucja Biel and Hendrik J. Kockaert
[Handbook of Terminology 3] 2023
► pp. 375–396

Measuring the quality of legal terminological decisions in institutional translation

A comparative analysis of adequacy patterns in three settings

| University of Geneva
| University of Geneva

Building on the premises of the LETRINT project, this study shows the applicability of a corpus-based methodology to identify patterns of legal terminological decision-making and measure their quality according to translation adequacy requirements in international organizations. The comparative adequacy assessment of translations of five illustrative terms into French and Spanish in the main European Union institutions, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization broadens the scope of previous studies of terminology translation quality in this field. It provides empirical evidence of the correlations between legal term singularity, translation difficulty and adequacy levels, and also of the impact of intratextual inconsistencies on these levels. The approach and findings can be used to support translation quality assurance and terminological resource refinements.

Keywords: institutional translation, legal terminology, translation adequacy, translation quality, translation difficulty level
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Approach and corpus
  • 3.The source terms and their translation
  • 4.Adequacy patterns: The impact of legal singularity
  • 5.The impact of intratextual inconsistencies
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC BY-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hot.3.mea1
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