Abstract

Legal terminology is undoubtedly a hallmark of legal discourses and a key component of quality control and competence evaluation in legal translation. The culture-bound and evolving nature of most legal concepts, the complexity of their semantic layers and the various degrees of asymmetry between their native legal systems and sources explain the added difficulty of terminological work in this area and the prominent attention devoted to it in Legal Translation Studies (LTS). Terminological problems illustrate the need to analyze changing situational factors and macrotextual parameters for decision-making at microtextual level. The enormous variability of such factors and their distinctive legal dimension call for specific methodologies. The integration of those variables into universally-applicable conceptual paradigms remains a major challenge. As Garzone (2000: 395) put it, ‘most studies have had their starting point in a specific experience in one area of this very broad field, so that the theoretical concepts proposed, however viable, have tended to be all but comprehensive in their scope of application.’