1.Legal terms

Law is “a normative social phenomenon” (Husa 2022, 43): it is a formal system of rules which regulate ways in which a society behaves and is a mechanism of social control (Harris 2006). Law is expressed, enforced and practiced through language. One of the crucial components of legal language is legal terminology, which is the focal point of this Handbook.

Legal terms have fascinated lawyers, linguists, terminologists, philosophers and other scholars for centuries. This can be illustrated, for example, by the popularity of early dictionaries of legal terms, with the 15th-century Vocabularius utriusque iuris of Roman law terminology being published in 70 editions until the early 17th century.11. Law Dictionary Collection, University of Texas, https://​tarlton​.law​.utexas​.edu​/law​-dictionaries​/intro (date of access 9.12.2022). Rapidly switching to modern times, the legendary Black’s Law Dictionary, first published in 1891, has its 11th edition in 2019. A newer type of resource, IATE – a consolidated terminology database of European Union (EU) institutions made available in 2004, documents as many as 7,673,806 terms and has 838,908 entries as at 2022.22.IATE – Interactive Terminology for Europe, iate.europa.eu (date of access 9.12.2022). In addition to countless legal glossaries, dictionaries and term bases, there are also many textbooks devoted to legal terminology. There is a clear need for such resources designed for legal professionals but also semi-experts and non-experts who encounter legal terms. Since law regulates various areas of life, legal terminology is present not only in highly specialized legal discourses but also permeates other domains and general language. The prolific terminographic activity is also motivated by the perceived complexity and obscurity of legal language and opacity of legal terms specifically. Terminology has also been reported to be a frequent source of litigation (Šarčević 1997, 241).

If we adapt definitions from the key ISO standard 1087: 2019 to the legal domain, a legal term may be defined as a designation that represents a concept by linguistic means (2019: 7) whereas a legal concept may be defined as a unit of legal knowledge (2019: 3). Legal concepts are particularly rich in meaning. From a synchronic perspective, legal concepts are “crystallisations of legal rules” (Mattila 2013, 137); however, as observed by Pozzo, “[l]egal concepts – within a particular legal system – are the result of the stratification of different meanings which have been developed over the course of time” (2012, 95). Even though some degree of similarity of concepts in related legal systems can be expected, this deep embedding of concepts in the knowledge structures of a particular legal system makes them ‘local’​. In other words, they are system-bound as they are shaped by a given legal system (Šarčević 1997, 240), where they are formulated and defined in legislation, applied, interpreted by the judiciary, immersed in local contexts and conditioned by the semantic structure of a given language, as well as shared intersubjectively among legal and other experts educated and/or practising in a particular jurisdiction (Biel 2023, forthcoming). In addition to their normative element, what makes legal concepts stand out against concepts of other special languages, e.g. science, technology, medicine or economics, is their ‘localness’ and a much lower degree of universality across languages and countries.

Given the system-bound nature of legal terminology and the resulting lack of one-to-one correspondence of concepts between legal languages (cross-systemic incongruity), it is hardly surprising that legal terminology has received considerable attention from Legal Translation Studies and related disciplines, such as Comparative Law and the emerging field of Law and Language, also known as Legal Linguistics. This is reflected in the number of contributions in this Handbook written by translation scholars or translation practitioners. Early studies on legal terminology were largely monolingual, e.g. Mellinkoff (1963), Tiersma (1999), or with some comparative elements, e.g. Mattila (2013). Legal terminology has naturally been studied by comparative lawyers, in particular those working with the traditional method – the so called functional method (Zweigert and Kötz 1998), who have been on the lookout for similarities – functional equivalents – in the legal systems they compare. Legal translation scholars were first predominantly concerned with practical aspects of translating legal terminology, above all the strategies and techniques of overcoming cross-systemic incongruity of terms and selecting adequate terminological equivalents (Alcaraz Varó and Hughes (2002); Biel (2008); Chromá (2004); Šarčević (1997); Weston (1991)). With the growing importance of translated law in international and supranational institutions, such as the United Nations or the European Union, considerable resources were invested in the development of term bases and other terminological resources to manage and standardize institutional terminology. Additionally, with the growing maturity of legal translation as a field, legal translation studies into terminology have increased their methodological and theoretical breath and sophistication, exploring it both quantitatively and qualitatively, as aptly illustrated in this Handbook. Another trigger was technological developments and risks associated with the inadequate and inconsistent treatment of legal terminology in machine translation.

Interest in legal terminology is also fuelled by major theoretical and methodological developments in the domain of Terminology itself, initiated in the 1990s. On the theoretical side, Terminology has moved beyond its traditional focus on standardization and has diversified considerably to embrace cognitive, communicative and social aspects of the use of terms, accounting for the textual behaviour of terms and embracing such phenomena as variation and polysemy (Faber and L’Homme 2022). On the methodological side, the advent of corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and natural language processing have transformed and facilitated term extraction, analysis and modelling with an unprecedented scale and accuracy, enhancing not only terminography but also research into terms. It has also inspired scholars to study not only terms but also their textual environment (co-text), including phraseology.

This third volume in the series of Handbook of Terminology follows logically Volume 1, which presents the general terminological approaches and principles without focusing on a specific linguistic area or domain. The Handbook of Terminology – Volume 2 – Terminology in the Arab world shifts terminology to the Arabic-speaking world, focusing on Arabic terminology standardization, on legal, medical, Sufi and Quranic terms while highlighting issues with both cultural and economic ramifications for the Arab world. Volume 3 shifts focus to the complex and sometimes opaque characteristics of legal terminology. It revisits terminology with a view to instrumentalizing and updating the prevailing terminology principles in authentic legal discourse and its collateral special language phenomena.

This Handbook attests to the vibrant research community working on legal terminology. It is the first attempt to bring together various perspectives and offers a compendium of information on legal terms in a single place. Even though the interest in legal terminology is relatively high and there has been a growing body of publications in this area in the last decade, the research is scattered among various sources, domains and languages. Our objective was to survey diverse approaches and combine perspectives of both scholars and practitioners from the domains of Terminology, Translation Studies, Linguistics, Law and Information Technology, but also contribute perspectives from a variety of legal systems. The Handbook comprises both systematic reviews of relevant topics, case studies and research papers.

2.Presentation of the contributions to the Handbook of Legal Terminology

The Handbook of Legal Terminology comprises 25 contributions and is divided into five sections. Part I, entitled Properties of Legal Terminology, introduces the most pertinent aspects of legal terms and concepts. Part II focuses on national legal terminology and addresses their ‘travelling’ via translation to other legal systems. Part III, the largest of all, attests to the importance of legal terminology in multilingual organizations. Part IV centres on legal terminography and discusses terminological tools and resources. Finally, Part V addresses legal terminology in training environments.

Part I, entitled Properties of Legal Terminology, introduces theoretical approaches to legal terminology and its essential properties with a special focus on normative, cognitive, communicative and linguistic aspects.

The opening contribution entitled “Frame approach to legal terminology: What may be gained from seeing terminology as manifestation of legal knowledge?” by Jan Engberg, a professor of knowledge communication, proposes the frame approach to legal terminology based on cognitive linguistics. The chapter first overviews various frame approaches to terminology, derived from Fillmore’s theory of meaning known as frame semantics, such as L’Homme’s lexical semantic approach (L’Homme 2020), Faber’s frame-based terminology (Faber and Cabezas-García 2019) and Temmerman’s socio-cognitive approach, which are applied to represent specialized knowledge and develop legal terminological resources. In the next part Engberg adopts frames – associative conceptual templates with slots and fillers – as an analytical tool for legal comparisons conducted by lawyers and translators. The frame approach attempts to capture the dynamics of legal knowledge by demonstrating that concepts are ‘non-monolithic’ and can have ‘competing versions’ with similar slot structures but different fillers. This alternative to traditional approaches accounts for cognitive and communicative aspects of legal terminology by representing knowledge behind legal communication.

In her contribution entitled “Definitions in law across legal cultures and jurisdictions”, Anna Jopek-Bosiacka describes the way in which legal definitions organize legal texts. After a quick detour via ISO-constructed intensional definitions (Löckinger, Kockaert and Budin 2015), she branches off into the avenue of legal terminological definitions, which she sees as instruments for creating new legal concepts. To this, she adds a dimension not yet practised in ISO-based terminology: legal definitions clarify crucial concepts in legal texts (Zieliński 2017). She emphasizes the importance of national and international guidelines for drafting legislation to ensure that definitions in the legal sphere fulfil their mission, i.e. explain the concepts at stake, meandering through the differences between legal systems and legal cultures. The author’s analysis of definitions integrates tools and selected methodologies from linguistics, legal theory, legal logic, logical semiotics and comparative law. The author draws on Anglo-Saxon, EU and Polish guidelines for drafting legislation, and she provides a comprehensible scheme of legal definitions by presenting model definitions that lead to the systematization of knowledge about drafting legal definitions.

The contribution by Stephen Mouritsen, a legal scholar, legal practitioner and a corpus linguist, entitled “Ordinary meaning in common law legal interpretation”, underscores the normative aspect of legal terminology by discussing the so-called ordinary or plain meaning rule which is a long-standing canon of common law statutory interpretation in the United States. Under this rule US judges are expected to assign standard rather than technical meaning to the wording of statutes. Mouritsen critically analyzes the concept of ordinary meaning and points out to the lack of systematic methods of determining it. Such determination, he argues, is often based on judges’ linguistic intuition and general purpose and/or legal dictionaries which are not always adequate for this purpose. In the light of these difficulties, recent scholarship has advocated the use of corpus linguistics and language corpora as a tool in statutory interpretation which provides usage evidence. As Mouritsen convincingly argues, corpora can help to determine ordinary meaning in a verifiable way.

In her chapter “Variation of legal terms in monolingual and multilingual contexts: Types, distribution, attitudes and causes”, Łucja Biel examines different phenomena of variation in legal terminology, presenting a multifaceted kaleidoscope reflecting linguistic, denominative and conceptual aspects, synchronic and diachronic dimensions, different acceptance criteria and intrasystemic, intersystemic and hybrid variants. The author displays a dichotomy between, on the one hand, linguistic and denominative variation, which is traditionally avoided due to the principles of consistency and continuity, and, on the other hand, conceptual variation, which she considers to be a useful drafting technique. She concludes her study by applying the typology used by Freixa (2006) to present functional, dialectal, discursive, cognitive and interlinguistic causes of variation in the legal context. Meritoriously, Łucja Biel adds a translation-oriented dimension to Freixa’s typological scheme by enriching it with causes related to formal and conceptual properties of terms that trigger variation in translation.

The final chapter in this section “The importance of being patterned. Old and new perspectives on legal phraseology” by corpus linguist Gianluca Pontrandolfo positions legal terminology in its broader linguistic context by overviewing traditional and recent corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to legal phraseology. Until relatively recently legal phraseology was largely left out of terminologists’ focus. The advent of corpus linguistics in the early 1990s brought new computerized methods and a strong interest in the patterning of language. Since that time research into legal patterns – prefabricated legal language – has thrived, bringing in descriptive data on the use of legal phraseology in text corpora. These data include not only combinatory properties of terms in the form of terminological collocations and formulaic expressions traditionally associated with the legal discourse. They also cover new types of phrasemes, such as binomial expressions and lexical bundles (clusters, n-grams) recognized according to the frequency criterion. The new approaches place terms in the phraseological continuum, demonstrating a fuzzy boundary between a term and a phraseme and the need to account for phraseology in the description of legal terminology.

Part II entitled National legal terminology in translation consists of five contributions which discuss the complexities of national legal terminology and challenges of its translation.

The first contribution in this Part, the chapter “Legal terms that travel: Constraints to presenting national legal terminology to international audiences” by Katia Peruzzo, a translation scholar and a terminologist, addresses the system-bound nature of legal terminology and challenges faced by translators and other legal writers when national legal terms become uprooted from their national contexts for international audiences. Despite their localness, legal terms ‘travel’ and are recontextualized in other legal systems. Peruzzo documents three main types of recontextualizing situations which disseminate national legal knowledge: translation of national legislation, but also other forms of writing, such as academic literature and international case law. The chapter identifies a number of constraints and factors which have to be taken into account when national legal terms ‘travel abroad’, such as the target audience, lingua franca, legal system of reference, comparative law methods, intertextuality and type of publication.

“Terminological features of Chinese legal language” is the title of the chapter by Deborah Cao. She moves through the linguistic phenomena of Chinese legal discourse before zooming in on the terminological phenomena of Chinese legal language. The author first sketches the historical and cultural developments and the context in which a classical Chinese conception of law evolved in traditional China. Next, she completes this overview with the emergence and development of modern Chinese legal language, which she views as a peculiar translated legal language. The author completes the description of Chinese legal language by presenting the main terminological features of modern Chinese legal language, deepening her analysis with some complexities she observed in selected illustrative examples of Chinese legal terminology. In her concluding remarks, she places Chinese legalese on a platform that all legal languages occupy because of their uniqueness and commonality.

Clara H-Y Chan and Edmund Cham submitted a chapter entitled “Bilingual legal terminology in Hong Kong: Past, present and future”. They describe the development of bilingual legal terminology in Hong Kong, which occupies a unique position as the only jurisdiction in the world to implement the common law system in English and Chinese. Logically, the authors analyze the translation of common law terminology into English and Chinese with a view to identifying current problems and exploring future directions. In particular, they look for appropriate strategies and methods for translating English legal terms into Chinese equivalents. The authors begin their journey through history by highlighting some milestones in how independent Hong Kong translated the common law system into Chinese. This process of ‘legal bilingualism’ began at the legislative level and was extended to the judicial level, resulting in the first bilingual law being enacted in 1989 and the first English judgment translated into Chinese in 1995. The authors argue for a sustainable translation and terminology management of case law, supported by appropriate methods for translating English legal terms into Chinese, ready to meet the local needs of post-colonial Hong Kong and the needs of the Chinese world at large. They conclude by emphasizing the importance of improving the accessibility of Hong Kong’s bilingual legal system through understandable legal language and terminology.

Houssine Id-Youss and Abied Alsulaiman present a chapter on the interaction between legal and religious concepts. The authors seek to instrumentalize the onomasiological and semasiological approaches to terminology, which they consider to be complementary in contemporary terminological practice, especially in legal terminology. Legal concepts are different in each society, reflecting the differences in that society, and they are part of national legal systems built on their own terminological apparatus and underlying conceptual structure (Šarčević 1997). The authors go beyond the archetypal onomasiological approach by analyzing the idiosyncratic features of Moroccan law, which reflect the prevailing political, social and religious peculiarities. In their chapter, they highlight the interaction between law and religion and show how this interaction is manifested in the Moroccan Family Code (Moudawana). They conclude that the interaction between law and religion, i.e. between Moroccan family law and Islamic legislation, has led them to a complementary osmosis between onomasiology and semasiology.

In “How equivalent is equivalence in Arabic-English legal translation?”, Ahmed Alaoui analyses the crucial concept of ‘equivalence’ in legal terminology and translation. The author starts from the premise that the aim of equivalence in translation is to assign the same meaning to legal terms in two languages, while retaining the same legal effect based on the legal interpretation of the source legal culture. In his study, he observes that this ideal goal seems difficult to capture in Arabic-English legal translation because of factors that mask important conceptual incongruities. His paper identifies some of the major stumbling blocks that tend to obscure the conceptual asymmetry between Islamic and Western law for legal translators: historical shifts, functional approach and equivalence, translation industry practice, and terminology resources (bilingual legal dictionaries). He argues that a viable way to avoid masking conceptual asymmetries is to provide translators with well-organized term bases. The author concludes that the functional approach to legal translation should observe fidelity to the source legal culture. This can only be achieved if the translator is equipped with adequate intercultural intelligence, which should take precedence over artificial intelligence in legal translation.

Part III – Legal Terminology in Multilingual Organizations is the largest part of the Handbook and comprises eight contributions on theoretical and practical aspects of supranational legal terminology with a special focus on the European Union’s institutions. It attests to the importance of terminology work in supranational and international organizations and intensive research activity in this area carried out by translation scholars, legal scholars and practitioners.

The opening contribution by lawyer-linguists Colin Robertson and Máirtín Mac Aodha, entitled “Legal terminology of the European Union”, introduces key properties of supranational terminology as a special category of legal terms. The authors position supranational terminology in its broader legal context by discussing the specificity of EU legal order, EU legal culture and the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union in shaping EU terminology when ensuring the uniform interpretation and application of EU law. The chapter highlights such properties of supranational terms as their autonomy, multilingualism and dual dimensions, that is their grounding in double – supranational and national – legal environment (Biel and Doczekalska 2020, 185), through interaction with the Member States’ legal systems. The authors stress the role of technology in terminology management and overview tools which are used by drafters and translators, paying special attention to the IATE (Interactive Terminology for Europe) term base.

Martina Bajčić entitled her chapter “Terminological variation and conceptual divergence in EU law”. The chapter starts from the generally accepted premise that terminological variation and conceptual divergence can undermine the uniform application and unambiguous interpretation of EU law. However, the author observes that in the pursuit of terminological consistency, conceptual divergence still occurs in the form of different interpretations of EU concepts at the level of the Member States. She tests the observed discrepancy between terminological variation and conceptual divergence with a case study of the European standard on the right of withdrawal. A corpus-based and legal analysis of the terms used for the right of withdrawal in several EU languages allowed the author to explain the phenomena of terminological variation and meaning modulation. She concludes that efforts to neutralize variation should be balanced against efforts to understand the ways in which variation affects the dynamic conceptualization of EU law, relying on terminology and lexical semantics as well as the principles of EU law. Bajčić calls for further interdisciplinary research that can broaden the context for studying term variants in EU law: (1) in terms of conceptual divergence and (2) in terms of legal information design.

The dual legal environment of EU terminology is explored in depth in the contribution entitled “Visualizing EU law through meta-concepts and legal formants” by Elena Ioriatti, a professor of comparative law. The chapter offers an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective on EU legal concepts based on semiotics and comparative law, in particular Rodolfo Sacco’s method of structural comparisons through the concept of ‘legal formants’ (norms). Ioriatti emphasizes the autonomy of supranational legal concepts and their detachment from cultural conceptual contexts and she proposes to treat them as ‘meta-concepts’. Next Ioriatti demonstrates how the characteristics (meaning) of meta-concepts emerge through interactions with national formants, such as national case law and other national norms, and how such meta-concepts are shaped by national interpreters due to the ‘semantic exteriorization of EU legislation’. This contribution demonstrates how theoretical constructs of comparative law can describe and explain the specificity of supranational terminology.

The next contribution, “Legal terms, concepts and definitions in the transposition of EU law”, by Agnieszka Doczekalska, a legal scholar specializing in EU law, analyzes a different aspect of the dual legal environment of EU supranational terminology, that is how EU terms and concepts travel to the EU Member States’ national legal orders when directives are transposed. During the transposition process national drafters incorporate EU directives into national law to achieve the objective required by directives, mainly by enacting national transposing legislation. Thus, this process captures the transfer of EU concepts into national legal orders. Doczekalska takes the legislative drafting technique of defining as her starting point and analyzes definitions in EU directives and their corresponding Polish transposing acts. This analysis identifies seven models of term/concept transfer into national law, such as the transfer of a term with a definition, a transfer of a definition without a term, modification or replacement of a directive term or no transfer at all.

In his contribution “From the domestic to the supranational: the terminology of “expulsion” as used at the European Court of Human Rights”, James Brannan, a senior translator with a background in law and languages, also addresses the interface between supranational and national legal environments of terminology from a translation point of view. It is a richly-illustrated fascinating journey through the expulsion terminology, its English and French domestic variants as well as other related international law terminology. As other international institutions, the European Court of Human Rights uses both its autonomous supranational concepts but is also faced with the need to translate culture-bound national terminology connected with a given case. Brannan discusses challenges faced by institutional legal translators when dealing with the expulsion terminology and mediating between supranational and national contexts. The contribution highlights the polysemy and variation of legal terminology.

Terminological quality in translation and terminology management are addressed by Karolina Stefaniak, translation quality officer and terminologist, in her contribution “Terminology management and terminology quality assurance in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation”. Stefaniak offers first-hand insights into how legal terms are managed by translating institutions through translation-oriented terminology workflows. The chapter first discusses challenges faced by institutional translators when searching for equivalents which ensure that EU autonomous terminology is translated accurately and uniformly to achieve the multilingual concordance of EU law in all the official languages. The chapter next discusses the role of institutional terminologists and terminology work consisting in term identification, storage, enforcement and verification as well as the multilevel interinstitutional coordination of terminology. Additionally, institutions invest in preparing tools and resources which improve terminological quality in translation. Last but not least, Stefaniak discusses terminological errors and resulting discrepancies between language versions and demonstrates the role of national authorities in shaping terminology through requests to publish corrigenda to EU legal acts.

In their contribution entitled “Measuring the quality of legal terminological decisions in institutional translation: A comparative analysis of adequacy patterns in three settings” legal translation scholars Fernando Prieto Ramos and Diego Guzmán explore factors which influence terminological issues in institutional translation. The chapter presents a comparative analysis of terminological decisions in the French and Spanish translations of selected procedural terms in three international organizations – the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. One of the merits of this contribution is the proposal for the corpus-based methodology for identifying patterns of translators’ terminological decisions and measuring their quality, the methodology which is empirically tested in the chapter. The analysis demonstrates correlations between legal term singularity, translation difficulty and adequacy levels: the higher the singularity and the translation difficulty, the lower adequacy levels and the higher intratextual terminological inconsistencies.

The final contribution in this section by corpus linguists Gloria Corpas Pastor and Fernando Sanchez Rodas, entitled “EU phraseological verbal patterns in the PETIMOD 2.0 corpus: a NER-enhanced approach”, analyzes phraseological verbal patterns of named entities which are important building blocks in discourse due to their capacity to reflect argument-structure patterns in sentences. The named entities are extracted automatically from the English-Spanish corpus of the European Parliament Committee on Petitions, which contains both translated and non-translated texts and interpreted and non-interpreted texts. The contribution offers a novel methodological combination of Named Entity Recognition with corpus linguistics to analyze the formulaicity of patterns involving terminology. The authors identify four types of named entities (persons, organizations, locations, miscellaneous) and demonstrate how they combine with text-organizing patterns, grammatical patterns and term-embedding collocations in various mediated and non-mediated modes. This contribution shows how a special category of terms can be used to study the features of translated and interpreted texts related to translationese.

Part IV on Terminological tools and resources comprises 5 chapters on various aspects of terminography and tools assisting terminology work.

The first contribution in this section by lexicographer Sandro Nielsen, entitled “Legal lexicography and legal information tools” offers a comprehensive overview of legal lexicography, a field which focuses on legal information tools in the form of printed and electronic dictionaries developed on the basis of various onomasiological and semasiological approaches. Working with the functional theory, Nielsen focuses on groups of users and their cognitive and communicative needs, the identification of which underlies functions of legal dictionaries, such as the production of legal texts in users’ native or non-native language, understanding of legal texts in users’ native or non-native language, translation into users’ native or non-native language, as well as acquisition of legal knowledge. As pointed out by Nielsen, dictionary functions determine the selection of terms, the inclusion of other types of data and the prescriptive/descriptive presentation of data within an entry.

In their chapter “Multilingual legal terminology databases: workflows and roles”, Elena Chiocchetti, Vesna Lušicky and Tanja Wissik present multilingual legal terminology databases (MLTDBs) and their specific features. They look at the structure of MLTDBs, focusing in particular on the number of legal systems involved, the different usage scenarios and the target users. The authors outline the steps of a typical workflow for the creation of MLTDBs, i.e. needs analysis, design, documentation, term extraction, terminology compilation, revision and quality assurance, maintenance and dissemination. The chapter concludes this analysis by pinpointing the essential discrepancies between MLTDBs and TDBs used in other domains, undoubtedly due to the unique linguistic and system-related aspects of the legal domain. They zoom in on the roles involved in legal terminology work, considering not only human users but also machines as a new type of user of terminological data. Machines can handle labour-intensive terminology work (e.g. term extraction, automatic ontology creation) as well as streamline the revision process. Finally, they address quality management, planning, assurance and control in MLTDBs, including some ISO/TC 37 terminology standards.

Jeffrey Killman’s contribution entitled “Machine translation and legal terminology: Data-driven approaches to contextual accuracy” addresses one of the recent ‘hot topics’ – namely, the treatment of legal terminology by two types of data-driven machine translation (MT) – statistical machine translation (SMT) and more recent neural machine translation (NMT). Despite significant progress achieved recently by machine translation, especially if the engine has been trained on domain-specific texts, high risk levels associated with legal texts make machine translation problematic, especially when used without human post-editing. Killman emphasizes contextual parameters of legal terminology and phraseology and their complexity. He concludes that context is “‘the Achilles’ heel of MT” and sees legal terminology as a source of potential errors in mechanical approaches to translation. Clearly the treatment of legal terminology in raw machine translation output and post-edited texts requires more empirical research as this area is highly likely to grow in importance in the coming years.

María José Marín Pérez’s contribution to the Handbook, “Automatic term recognition and legal language: a shorter path to the lexical profiling of legal texts?”, examines the role of NLP tools in providing linguists with different ways of retrieving terminology in any text. The comparative study analyses and discusses the success of the ATR methods used by Chung (2003), Drouin (2003) and Scott (2008) to measure the degree of reliability of automatically recognized legal terms. Her case study focuses on two corpora of Spanish and British judicial decisions related to immigration. The author concludes with some thoughts on future research that could benefit from her methodology in order to achieve a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of legal texts and their terminology.

In their chapter entitled “The role of Semantic Web technologies in legal terminology”, Patricia Martín-Chozas, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda and Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel, embark on a study of AI and NLP in the field of legal terminology. The emergence of AI-driven services and NLP techniques has led to an increased need for high-quality terminology resources. They note that considerable manual effort is still required to produce such resources, many of which are produced in non-machine readable formats, which hinders their reuse. The authors analyze how the Semantic Web can help represent legal language resources and how their publication in open formats can contribute to their interoperability. They provide the reader with an overview of the Semantic Web, reviewing existing legal language resources and the semantic models used to represent them. To support their findings, the authors offer a series of practical examples to demonstrate the benefits that should encourage users to adopt the Semantic Web technologies described.

Part V – Legal terminology in training contexts – zooms in on didactic aspects of legal terminology and explores how it is taught to interpreting and translation trainees.

Mariana Orozco turns the audience’s attention to court interpreting in her contribution entitled “Dealing with legal terminology in court interpreting”. Orozco begins by describing the role of court interpreters in ensuring equal access to justice for those who do not speak the language of the court. She rightly argues that the effective use of legal terminology in court interpreting is crucial in order to interpret accurately and to ensure that the legal intent of the message is clearly understood by all parties involved. The first section examines the major difficulties in court interpreting, particularly when it comes to providing accurate legal terminology on the spot. Various existing models and criteria for accuracy in court interpreting are presented, followed by an overview of a training approach that has proved effective in helping court interpreter students to create their own glossaries, involving monolingual and bilingual research. In her concluding remarks, she recommends the creation of glossaries and offers some useful ideas, one of which is to start with monolingual research and then provide the target language equivalents.

Catherine Way presents a chapter on training in “Legal translator terminology training: unravelling the mysteries”. The author sketches an overview starting from the 1980s, when translation studies (TS) took up the concept of “equivalence” (Halverson 1997) and terminology was introduced as a separate subject in many translation programmes. Turning to the situation of trainees, she observes that at an advanced stage of the translation programme, trainees discover legal translation, following their training in research, (concept-oriented) terminology and IT skills, and logically following their previous courses and practice in translation. Instead of focusing on the What, Way proposes an approach that focuses on the How and Why, which she believes is necessary to lay the foundations for the acquisition of sustainable legal terminology competence, through tools that enable trainees to consolidate their recently acquired knowledge, so that they can progress towards becoming competent, expert legal translators. Essential steps on this path to excellence are the acquisition of greater self-confidence and the adoption of translation-oriented terminology that is inextricably linked to the different cultural, historical, legal, administrative and institutional contexts of the source and target texts.

We hope that this Handbook will be a useful reference and resource for scholars, practitioners, trainers and students from a range of disciplines, in particular Legal Translation Studies, Law and Language, Terminology, Legal Studies, and Linguistics. Despite its breadth and depth, we were naturally not able to cover all the topics we wanted but the Handbook is a good starting point which attests to the multifaceted nature of legal terminology as a field of practice and research.

We wish to thank all the contributors for sharing their expertise on legal terms and anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable feedback.