Abstract

The use of computer corpora for the analysis of legal language is not common practice; still less the use of parallel corpora for the comparison of legal terminology. The Bononia Legal Corpus project (BoLC) began two years ago, and now as the first stage reaches completion, some important issues must be addressed. This paper will present findings from the first stage of the project, in which European Community directives and judgements have been analysed to identify actual translation equivalents in Italian and English. The main points to be discussed are the clarification of concept boundaries when dealing with terminology in different languages, and the help or hindrance of dictionaries in identifying translation equivalents.