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Part of
Handbook of Terminology: Volume 3. Legal Terminology
Edited by Łucja Biel and Hendrik J. Kockaert
[Handbook of Terminology 3] 2023
► pp. 351–374

Terminology management and terminology quality assurance in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation

| European Commission, Directorate-General for Translation

Correct and consistent terminology is crucial for high quality legal translation. Therefore, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) places great emphasis on terminology work and on integrating terminology in the translation process. At the central level, the Terminology Coordination Unit is tasked with extracting terms from texts intended for translation and clarifying the concepts, whereas at the level of departments, department terminologists search for adequate terms in their respective languages. The translators’ role is to apply this terminology and ensure its consistency. DGT has at its disposal a number of resources to assist translators and terminologists in these tasks, and has also developed several in-house tools for terminology extraction and for checking terminological consistency in ongoing translations.

Keywords: EU translation, legal translation, terminology management, terminological consistency, quality assurance tools
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Terminology in legal translation
    • 2.1Terminology accuracy in EU legal acts
    • 2.2EU guidelines on terminological consistency
    • 2.3Machine Translation and terminology
  • 3.Ensuring translation quality through terminology management
    • 3.1Terminology work in DGT
      • Actors
      • Term identification
      • Term storage
      • Term enforcement
    • 3.2Tools for ensuring terminological consistency
  • 4.Terminology and multilingual concordance
  • 5.Conclusions
  • 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.ter12
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