Multilingual Legal Terminology on the Jibiki Platform: The LexALP Project

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 937–944, Sydney, July 2006. c⃝2006 Association for Computational Linguistics Multilingual Legal Terminology on the Jibiki Platform: The LexALP Project Gilles S´erasset, Francis Brunet-Manquat Universit´e Joseph Fourier, Laboratoire CLIPS-IMAG, BP 53 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9 - France, Gilles.Serasset@imag.fr Francis.Brunet-Manquat@imag.fr Elena Chiocchetti EURAC Research Viale Druso 1 39100 Bozen/Bolzano - Italy Elena.Chiocchetti@eurac.edu Abstract This paper presents the particular use of “Jibiki” (Papillon’s web server develop- ment platform) for the LexALP1 project. LexALP’s goal is to harmonise the ter- minology on spatial planning and sustain- able development used within the Alpine Convention2, so that the member states are able to cooperate and communicate efficiently in the four official languages (French, German, Italian and Slovene). To this purpose, LexALP uses the Jibiki plat- form to build a term bank for the con- trastive analysis of the specialised termi- nology used in six different national legal systems and four different languages. In this paper we present how a generic plat- form like Jibiki can cope with a new kind of dictionary. 1 Introduction One of the most time-consuming hindrances to supranational law drafting and convention nego- tiation is the lack of understanding among nego- tiators and technical writers. This is not only due to the fact that different languages are involved, but mainly to the inherent differences in the legal systems. Countries that speak the same language (like France and part of Switzerland) may use the same word to represent different legal concepts3, 1Legal Language Harmonisation System for Environment and Spatial Planning within the Multilingual Alps 2http://www.convenzionedellealpi.org 3E.g.: In the German-speaking province of Bolzano Italy the Landeshauptmann is the president of the provincial coun- cil, with much more limited competence that the Austrian Landeshauptmann, who is head of one of the states (Bundes- land) that are part of the Austrian federation. as defined in their respective legal traditions. The same concept may be referred to in different ways according to the legal system4. Also, terms that may superficially seem to be translations of each other can represent different legal notions5. In order to concretely address these problems, several institutions representing translators, ter- minologists, legal experts and computational lin- guists joined in the LexALP project, co-funded by EU’s INTERREG IIIb Alpine Space programme. The objective of the project is to compare the spe- cialised terminology of six different national legal systems (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzer- land and Slovenia) and three supranational sys- tems (EU law, international law and the particu- lar framework of the Alpine Convention) in the four official languages of the Al-pine Convention, which is an international framework agreement signed by all countries of the Alpine arc and the EU. This contrastive analysis serves as a basis for the work of a group of experts (the Harmonising Group) who will determine translation equivalents in French, Italian, German and Slovene (one-to- one correspondence) in the fields of spatial plan- ning and sustainable development for use within the …

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