Meine Cookie EinstellungenTerminology Databases as Resources to Support Plain Legal Language
Wissik T, Chiocchetti E
Providing information in plain language, including legal information, has become increasingly important in recent years. The four governing principles of plain language communication—relevance, findability, understandability (clarity), and usability—are applicable to legal contexts as well, despite the added challenges posed by the requirement of legal correctness and the system-boundness of legal language. This chapter shows how terminology databases, generally employed for translation and knowledge structuring purposes, are used and could be used even further to support the drafting of plain language texts and intralingual translations of legal texts into plain language. Resources that respect the basic principles of terminology work (e.g., concept orientation, term autonomy, and data elementarity) are better structured and more flexible than common plain language glossaries. They are easily searchable and can be made interoperable with other tools (e.g., computerassisted translation tools, machine translation tools) to ensure the effective use and reuse of data. Terminology databases provide conceptual (e.g., definitions, broader terms, concept maps) and linguistic information (e.g., synonyms, abbreviations, simplified variants, examples of use) on legal concepts that efficiently support plain language writing.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-87993-7_142-1
